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It began with a flimsy yellow ribbon and ended with a riot, two arrests and a courtroom hearing.

At about 6 a.m. Wednesday, the UC Berkeley Police Department started taping off the oak grove adjacent to the UC Berkeley Memorial Stadium to construct an eight-foot chain-link fence around the grove.

Protesters have been camped in the trees since December in an effort to stop the university’s plan to remove the trees.

A scuffle between the UC police and protesters during a Wednesday evening rally held by Save the Oaks turned into a riot when the police confiscated food and water that was being sent up to the tree sitters.

UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof told the Planet that the temporary fence would create a “safety zone around trees adjacent to Memorial Stadium” to protect both the tree-sitters and the 73,000 fans who are expected at the stadium for Saturday’s football game against University of Tennessee.

The tree sitters are protesting the university’s plan to raze the grove to make way for a $125 million student-athlete high performance center in its place, a move that led the City of Berkeley to sue the university over safety concerns.

“Emotions and passions are running high on both ends,” Mogulof told the Planet. “A temporary barrier is needed because protesters continue to illegally occupy some trees at the site and investigations by the UC police have suggested that it would be a good idea to put a fence up before fans come to the game. We are going to analyze this on a week-to-week basis.”

Assistant UC Police Chief Mitch Celaya told the Planet Wednesday afternoon that the tree sitters had been asked to come down before university-hired contractors had started constructing the fence.

“They made a choice,” Celaya said. “We are not trying to start a riot. We are just trying to prevent potential problems. We don’t want the football fans to walk into the [grove]. We are not allowing anybody to go in and if anyone tries to leave or provide food or water to the tree sitters they will be cited for trespassing.”

Steve Volker, attorney for the California Oaks Foundation—one of the three plaintiffs in the lawsuit against UC’s plans to construct the training center—arrived at the grove Wednesday to inform protesters that he had filed a restraining order for the fence that was heard Thursday in Hayward Superior Court.

“This fence is contrary to Judge Barbara Miller’s ruling on Feb. 9 that there should be no physical alteration on the environment of the oak grove until the court rules on the merits of the case on Sept. 19,” he said. “It is a direct attack on fundamental rights, a noose on the First Amendment ... Berkeley is the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and it now threatens to be its graveyard. This day will be remembered as a day of infamy for this university as an attempt to crush the community’s voice.”

Citing a similar case at Cornell University where the court had upheld a student’s right to remain on a tree to protest its being cut down, Volker said that courts have repeatedly ruled that no one should be deprived of their civil rights—food and water in this case—on a college campus.

“The sitters have a constitutional right to protest the logging of the trees,” he said. “They have placed themselves in harm’s way to protect these trees. We either make a stand now or watch our rights disappear.”

The first altercation took place when the tree sitters got down to the lower branches and one of their supporters tried to attach a can of guacamole to a bag lowered with ropes. UC police cut the rope off with a pole cutter while an angry group of surrounded them, screaming “shame on you.”

“Fuck you, Pigs,” said one of the protesters. “What are the rules? We will get food up there one way or the other.”

At one point supporters started throwing apples and granola bars inside the fence while others continued attempts to tie bottles of water and food packets to the ropes lowered from the trees.

Celaya said the police were preventing food and water from being sent up to the trees since the sitters were already stockpiled with supplies.

After observing the situation at the grove, Mayor Tom Bates said in a statement, “While the university may have serious concerns about the safety of the protesters and football fans at Saturday’s game, there is simply no justification for UC Berkeley Police to deny protesters food and water.”

“UC’s actions are unacceptable and I believe they are putting people’s lives at risk unnecessarily,” Bates said. “I contacted the chancellor’s office to urge them in the strongest possible terms to reconsider their position and allow the protesters access to food and water. Regardless of a person’s opinion of the merits of the tree sitters protest or the UC stadium proposal, we all need to respect basic human and civil rights.”

Close to 6 p.m. students, community members and a few city officials gathered outside the fence to watch the tug-of-war between the tree sitters and UC police. After about half a dozen attempts to prevent the protesters from handing over more food, UC police made two arrests.

Celaya said that Joseph Fisher, 18, was arrested on two counts of battery and one count of resisting arrest and Drew Beres, 18, could be charged with one count of resisting arrest. Nobody was injured.

The arrests led to more pushing, yelling and general chaos at the grove. At one point police chased a man dressed in black down Piedmont Avenue. Some protesters formed a circle in front of the evening traffic and refused to budge from the spot for almost 15 minutes.

“Cut your engine off,” one woman told a driver of a silver Toyota. “You are not going anywhere.”

“Berkeley’s back,” yelled another oak grove supporters. Drum beats echoed in the distance and strains from the UC football band practicing for Saturday’s game added to the melee of sounds at the grove.

“They are attempting to deny the protesters food and water to starve them out of the trees,” said former mayoral candidate Zachary Running Wolf, who was one of the initial tree sitters. “There are many measures that can be done to control crowds. They say they are protecting the sitters but are refusing them their fundamental rights at the same time.”

“We shall overcome,” sang Berkeley resident Debbie Moore strumming a guitar as she stood wrapped in yellow police tape to show her support for what might be the longest-standing urban tree-sit.

“How much did that fence cost?” asked Jonathan Huang, a UC Berkeley sophomore.

“That’s my out-of-state tuition money that’s going to build a fence,” said another UC Berkeley student. “My parents worked their butts off to pay the $40,000 a year and this is what I get! I am pissed off!”

As evening paved the way for night, the UC cops pulled out six generators and 25 spotlights. A thick yellow rope was let down for water, but this time the police did not attempt to block it.

“I think our response will be summed up in one word: De-fence,” a masked tree-sitter told media news crews from his leafy perch. “The tree sitters and UC are too polarized and it’s hard to bridge that gap.”

Amy Elmgren, a peace and conflict studies major from UC Berkeley, pressed her nose against the fence to watch the UC police officers videotaping the tree sitters.

“I think this is insane,” she said. “Before today I was ambivalent about what was going on at the grove but this certainly changes it. I am hoping this will reinvigorate student activism on campus.”

Gianna Ranuzzi, a long-time Berkeley resident, said she was worried that the poles were damaging the tree roots.

Catcalls, boos and whistles followed the police as they patrolled the grove. The crowds started thinning around 7 p.m.

The next scheduled showdown will be the lawsuit scheduled to be heard on Sept. 19.

In a statement released Wednesday afternoon Mayor Bates said that he was open to negotiations for a settlement agreement regarding the lawsuit.

“From the beginning, I have maintained that a negotiated settlement that addresses our significant public safety and legal issues is a preferred outcome,” he said. “It is regrettable that the university made no offer at the court-mandated settlement conference in February and has yet to submit any settlement offer to the city in this litigation. In fact, the university’s lawyers have at all times urged that this case be expedited to a court resolution. The university sent a letter to the City Council and me last month with an update on their plans—including modest changes such as a reduction in their new parking lot and improved landscaping—but made no offer to negotiate.”

The statement, however, issues a caveat that the city was one of four entities engaged in legal action over the university’s proposed stadium projects and “even if the city were to reach an acceptable resolution, the lawsuit would likely continue.”

UC Berkeley officials have emphasized the importance of a new gym for its 13 athletic teams to replace the seismically unsafe Memorial Stadium, but the city contends that the proposed site is unsafe since it located on the Hayward Fault.

The Berkeley City Council is scheduled to meet in closed session with its lawyers on Tuesday to discuss the litigation. Bates has requested that the university provide information about a settlement agreement to the city’s attorneys so that the council is able to consider it.

Judge Barbara Miller ruled late Thursday that the chain-link fence at the UC stadium oak grove does not violate the preliminary injunction against any alteration at the site.

Steve Volker for the California Oaks Foundation and others, Michael Lozeau for the Panoramic Hill Association and Charles Olson for UC Berkeley battled out the fate of the fence at an hour-long hearing in Judge Miller’s Hayward courtroom earlier in the day.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday at the Alameda County Superior Court by Volker and Lozeau alleged that the university violated the Feb. 9 injunction by constructing the fence.

Miller also ruled that the protesters’ free speech rights were not before her in the lawsuit and even assuming that the court had jurisdiction over the free speech issue, evidence presented had shown that protesters had been involved in illegal trespassing and assault with a deadly weapon.

Volker told the Planet he respected the judge’s ruling.

“She is technically correct,” he said. “The lawsuit challenges the university’s construction of the student-athlete center. It has nothing to do with free speech.”

Volker said he would not appeal the judge’s ruling since he was confident of winning the Sept. 19 lawsuit on the issue. He said he took exception to UC’s decision to deprive the tree sitters within the fence of food and water.

“We want to cut to the chase and not get distracted at this point,” he said. “Whether or not the university could attempt to curb their lines of supply with impunity remains an open question.”

Miller said that she would not rule on whether the tree- itters could remain in the oak grove or if the supporters could supply them with food and water.

During the afternoon hearing, Volker complained that UC failed to meet and confer regarding the proposal to enclose the oak grove.

“We could have reached an accommodation,” Volker told Judge Miller. “Instead UC preemptively struck and put up a fence anchored in concrete with padlocked gates which leaves the protesters stranded in the trees and the public excluded.”

Lozeau pointed out that UC has used temporary barriers on game days to block and divert traffic and they could have done the same around the trees for the days the football game was on at the Memorial Stadium.

Olson, attorney for the university and the UC Regents, said he concluded that the fence was outside the scope of the Feb. 9 court order.

“What about less restrictive alternatives?” Miller asked him.

“UC is strapped for security on game day and the situation is exacerbated this year as the tree sitters presence is well known,” he told the judge. “UC Police chief Victoria Harrison is extremely concerned about the extreme volatility in a very difficult situation.”

The UC Police Department also provided testimony of vandalism in the oak grove, including exhibits of spray-painted trees. No convictions have been made on any of the vandalism charges.

“If there are 80,000 people attending the game and lots of passion on both sides, shouldn’t they separate them?” Judge Miller asked Volker.

Volker replied that there were less intrusive ways of doing this.

“The protesters are entrapped,” he said.

“Doesn’t this protect the protesters?” Miller asked

“Not if you deny them food and water,” Volker replied.

Volker also said that the fence furthered the proposed Student-Athlete High Performance Center because it forced the protesters out.

Oak grove supporters who showed up at the hearing included Michael Kelly of the Panoramic Hill Association, Doug Buckwald of Save the Oaks and Berkeley residents Sylvia MacLaughlin and Leslie Emmington.

“The people in the trees have given their lives to save the trees for 270 days, and they are being brushed off as miscreants by the university,” Voker said. “The university talks about public health and safety and then puts 72,000 spectators in one of the most dangerous stadiums in the world. The stadium stands over the Hayward Fault.”

Volker added, “They want to starve the tree sitters out. When one good soul provided food to the tree sitters yesterday, he was arrested. Anyone attempting to give food and water was arrested. There will be six games this fall, and UC can always provide temporary barriers on game days.”

The first day of the new school year went off without a hitch for Berkeley public schools Wednes-day.

There were the usual back-to-school jitters, of course: the rush for last-minute registration, the minor school kitchen faux pas, and the kindergartner from Yemen who was sent home because he was too jetlagged for class.

Other than that everything went according to plan. At LeConte Elementary School students were treated to strawberries while their parents thronged the school’s auditorium to learn about health, transportation and after-school programs.

“We are happy to be back after summer, energized and ready to learn,” LeConte principal Cheryl Wilson told the Planet during the morning reception.

“One of my major goals is to help those who are below and far below the STAR program requirements.”

STAR scores for the Berkeley Unified School District gained a point in the recently released California STAR test results.

Wilson added that the school would begin an extensive reading campaign, which would focus on fluency and endurance levels.

“The district provides support for math, reasoning and conceptual understanding for all kids,” she said. “We also want to focus on the importance of writing for 4th and 5th graders.”

For new parents, LeConte represented more of a community than an educational institution. “We wanted to be able to walk our child to school,” said August Fern, whose oldest child started school Wednesday. “I am kind of expecting to find a sense of belonging here. I am sure my son will make lots of friends in the classroom. Since he likes sports, I am hoping I can find something suitable for him.”

In one corner, Lyn Dailey from the city’s health department answered questions from anxious parents about MediCal.

“Depending on immigration status, some kids may not qualify for healthcare,” Dailey said. “There is also very little insurance available for adults, but we try to fill all the gaps and meet the needs of the whole family.”

As the kids filed neatly into room KG 110, names were exchanged and new friendships formed. The shy ones hid behind Ms. Mary Lewis’ skirt, hesitant yet curious about the goings-on in the classroom.

“This year we are trying out ‘Balanced Beginnings’ for the first time at LeConte,” said Ms. Lewis, the school’s kindergarten teacher. “According to this program, we don’t place the new students permanently in a class until all the kindergarten teachers have met them and had a sense of who they are. As a result the classes end up balanced in language, gender and maturity level.”

Out in the yard, freshmen Matilda Hallowell, Juan Garcia and Mateo Gran-Rodriguez had just completed a lesson in recycling. The students belong to a Spanish emersion program that teaches in two languages and provide lots of play-acting.

Charity DeMarto, director of the LeConte community after-school program, said the focus was on community partnership with local programs and enrichment classes.

“We want to open up all the resources to the community,” she said. “A lot of kids don’t live in the neighborhood, so we want them to feel they are a part of it too.”

At Malcolm X Elementary School, Berkeley Unified nutritional services director Ann Cooper gave a hint about what the new school year meant in terms of food.

“It’s all about organic milk this year,” she said pointing toward the cavernous school kitchen where elementary school lunches are prepared every day.

Malcolm X principal Cheryl Chinn said she was expecting a marked improvement in the API and AYP scores scheduled to be released Friday (today).

“Last year, the school received a score of 785 out of 800 in the API,” she said. “We have continued our focus on arts and academics. We can’t forget that we are officially an arts magnet school. Last year we started a strategic plan that allowed us time to monitor and assess our students every year, and our focus is on closing the achievement gap for African Americans and Latinos.”

Posie Romweber, a newcomer at the school, was busy doing puzzles with kindergarten teacher Maylynee Gill.

“This is just my first day,” Posie said. “It’s a little scary to be at a big school, but I made some new friends.”

In another part of South Berkeley, B-Tech principal Victor Diaz was finishing up a welcoming speech in one of the classrooms.

The campus was picture perfect Wednesday afternoon, all 110 students hard at work on their assignments.

“The school has a capacity of 140, so we are expecting some more students from Berkeley High in the next few weeks,” Diaz said. “It’s not a popular move to move students from the high school to out here but it’s important. It’s the collective district’s efforts to retain a student, and we do a great job.”

Diaz, who is currently in his fourth year as principal, said that the attendance for the summer program had been very high.

“We started out with 80 students,” he said. “These are kids who would have not gone to Berkeley High. Some of them also had a chance to intern with the mayor’s office and various city councilmembers. At the end of the program, nearly all the kids passed their classes.”

B-Tech saw one of its seniors enter a four-year college program this fall for the first time in the school’s history.

Although Diaz said that the school was moving in the right direction, he emphasized the need for better performance in the standardized tests.

“We didn’t do so well in the STAR tests and I don’t think we will do any better in the AYP’s,” he said. “There is a districtwide culture that state tests are not important, but if we don’t take it seriously then it disproportionately affects our students.”

One of the bright spots for B-Tech students this new school year is the opening of the Derby Field right next door. The school, which lacked open space for physical activity, will now be able to use the space for PE classes and other school programs.

Oakland Unified School District board members were informed on Wednesday night that a $1.4 million district deficit in the adopted 2007-08 budget—which district officials had said had been whittled down from a projected $4.3 million deficit last June—was now up to $4.7 million in updated figures recently compiled by the district’s interim chief financial officer.

A district spokesperson said by telephone today that the in-creased deficit figures was a rollover from higher than expected enrollment that has not yet been matched by increased state funds to handle the necessary teaching personnel, causing “financial pressure in the short run.”

“The increased enrollment is a good thing,” district spokesperson Troy Flint said by telephone. “But the revenues needed to take care of that increase has not yet caught up, and that, of course, is a bad thing.”

The bad financial news was presented to board members this week by OUSD State Admini-strator Kimberly Statham and interim CFO Leon Glaster for information purposes only.

Under the terms of the 2003 state takeover of the OUSD, board members have neither responsibility for budget problems nor the ability to cure them. The board only recently won back limited self-control in the areas of community relations and governance. Fiscal control remains in the hands of the state-appointed administrator.

In her report to the board, Statham said she had instructed Glaster to “establish a plan to correct our ongoing structural deficit” and to present a balanced budget by December of 2007.

The figures that led to the $1.4 million deficit projected in the adopted June budget were prepared by former OUSD CFO Javetta Robinson, who Statham fired in July. The revised figures were prepared by Glaster, Robinson’s interim replacement. District spokesperson Flint said the revised figures were based upon Glaster’s “more conservative projections. We are trying to be exceptionally prudent, and think that it is best to err on the conservative side.”

The revised figures put the blame for the increase deficit primarily on increased certificated salaries ($1.3 million more than budgeted), classified salaries ($1.2 million more), benefits ($325,000 more), and services and operations ($987,000 more).

Flint explained that Glaster penciled in a higher number of substitute teachers to ensure that each classroom in the district was staffed at all times, and also added an increase in the custodial staff.

California school districts are prohibited by law from passing out-of-balance budgets, and it was the discovery of a massive deficit that led to the state takeover of the Oakland schools in 2003. But since the only penalty for the introduction of such a budget is takeover by the state, the state does not appear to be subject to any legal consequences when passing unbalanced budgets in school districts it already runs.

OUSD Board President David Kakishiba called the situation a “fiscal crisis” on Wednesday night. During a telephone interview on Thursday, Kakishiba said that “Under normal circumstances, if we were an out of state receivership and had passed an initial budget that was $1.4 million in the red and then, two months later, moved the deficit up to $4.7 million, it would begin to raise questions about the reliability of the board and the administration to keep the district fiscally solvent.”

Kakishiba added that “we are in the fifth year of state receivership. There is no excuse at this point not to have a balanced budget.”

The board president said that it was time for the district to begin to analyze increases in the number of full-time teachers and administrators over the last two years that might have led to the current structural deficit. “Personnel is 80 percent of our budget, and if we are overspending, it is likely that the problem will be found there,” he said.

Kakishiba added that there are two specific areas that may have contributed to personnel increases.

“We have created more schools,” he said, and the Expect Success! administrative model the district has been operating under for the past three years “requires that more administrators be hired.”

Kakishiba said that Expect Success! in particular “deserves some reflection time for the district. One of the tenets of Expect Success! is to establish good business practices for district operations. I think it’s ironic that our fiscal situation has deteriorated following its adoption by the district. That doesn’t sound like very good business practice.”

Flint added that the district is still in the discovery phase of the process, and while officials have identified some, but not all, of the areas where cuts will be made, the district is not ready to reveal any of them.

“It’s evident that some belt-tightening will take place,” the spokesperson said. “We are looking at every aspect of district operations,” adding that the cuts will be made without sacrificing the district’s core educational goals. He said that the district expects to restore the legally mandated two percent operating reserve and eliminate the structural deficit by June of 2009.

The battle lines over just how much and how high new development should rise in downtown Berkeley are growing, with UC Berkeley weighing in on the side of greater density.

Assistant Vice Chancellor Emily Marthinsen will make the university’s case Tuesday night when she addresses the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC).

Marthinsen, who works on capital projects and planning for the school, expressed her concerns in a four-page letter to Dan Marks, the city’s director of planning and development.

With up to 800,000 square feet of development planned off-campus in the city center, the university is the biggest player in the downtown development sweepstakes, and Marthinsen’s letter makes clear the university wants a taller downtown than some DAPAC members might like.

According to the legal settlement that resulted in the creation of a new plan, UC holds an equal say with the city over the plan, and the planning effort is staffed by two planners—one working for the city and the other for the university—with the university giving the city $250,000 for the planning process.

If the city doesn’t adopt a plan to the university’s liking by the end of May 2009, the university will start cutting off $15,000 a month from compensatory funds it is paying the city to make up for the financial impacts of its development on the community.

Both the city and the university agreed to use an outside mediator in the event of a dispute—and the university “reserves the right to determine if the DAP or EIR meets the Regents’ needs.”

The EIR is the environmental review that must be completed and approved with the adoption of a new plan.

The planning process is spelled out in the May 25, 2005, settlement of a lawsuit filed by the city over the impacts of the university’s Long Range Development Plan 2020—a document that doesn’t include the stadium area, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory or the university’s Richmond Field Station.

Marthinsen’s letter to Marks spells out the university’s vision of the downtown more clearly than anything yet placed before the committee.

“Based on both urban design and economic factors, we propose the DAP include height and density limits on the downtown blocks adjacent to campus with at least these values:

• Maximum height of 90 feet, not counting a structure of house mechanical gear on the roof.

• An average building height of 75 feet for the area between Hearst Avenue and Berkeley Way and between Allston Way and Durant Avenue.

• A maximum floor-to-area-above-the-ground-floor of six-to-one between Berkeley and Allston ways and a four-to-one ratio between Berkeley and Allston ways to Durant Avenue.”

In addition, the university wants the city to consider even greater heights and densities on “certain parcels” in the downtown core to encourage “projects with extraordinary public benefits such as the proposed downtown hotel.”

Marthinsen had no problem with the notion of limiting the street facades of buildings to 50 feet, with higher development stepped back from the frontages.

But the university “opposes height and density criteria based on an unreasonably low ‘base’ limit, which may be only increased through ‘bonus’ provisions designed to promote specific policy goals”—a position certain to spark resistance from many DAPAC members.

In addition to bonuses already in existence for building lower-rent apartments and condos into new buildings, DAPAC members have also proposed bonuses for green building practices designed to reduce energy emissions and consumption, both in construction materials and during the life of a structure.

Marthinsen wrote that the university also wants more Class A office space downtown “[t]o capture for the city the potential of entrepreneurial ventures generated by university research and professional programs” as well as to support downtown daytime vitality.

The university also “intends to explore an above-grade [parking] structure” on the site now occupied by University Hall Annex, she wrote.

Long session

Tuesday night’s session will be unusually long for the committee, starting at 6:30 with a presentation by landscape architect Walter Hood of his concepts for a plaza on Center Street between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue.

A UC Berkeley professor and former chair of university’s Landscape Architecture Department, Hood also heads his own design firm. His proposal, described by Marks as an “advocacy plan,” is being funded by grants from the Mazer Foundation and several local donors.

The notion of a block-long pedestrian plaza, perhaps incorporating a daylighted Strawberry Creek, was first broached by the city committee appointed to

offer suggestions for the hotel the university plans at the northeast corner of the intersection of Center and Shattuck Avenue.

After public comments, Marthinsen will make her pitch, followed by a committee review of the plans draft Land Use Policies and Alternatives chapter.

The meeting is being held in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

The joint subcommitee of the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) and the Downtown Area Planning Advisory Commission (DAPAC) met Monday to develop a final version of the Historic Preservation and Urban Design chapter which DAPAC is scheduled to consider this fall.

The DAPAC-LPC subcommittee has finished making changes to most of the document with the exception of a couple of goals and the strategic statement. Members decided to continue the issues to another meeting in September. A date has not been set.

DAPAC chair Will Travis asked subcommittee members to abandon the idea of a historic district during public comment.

“I don’t believe you have made a compelling case as to why a downtown historic district is necessary or how it would make the downtown more vibrant, more attractive or more successful,” he said. “The Landmarks Preservation Commission is responsible for seeing that Berkeley’s historic architectural resources are protected. The LPC already has all the authority it needs to ensure that any remodeling, alteration, expansion or any other change to a designated landmark or a structure of merit will be in keeping with the integrity and character of the historic structure. The LPC can add more buildings to this inventory of historic resources at any time. And any proposed demolition of any building over 40 years old is referred to the LPC, which can decide whether the building is worthy of being designated and spared from destruction.”

DAPAC member Wendy Alfsen said that she was in favor of improving downtown but did not want to turn it into a monolith.

“I don’t want the new buildings to look like they were plunked down from outer space,” she said.

Deborah Badhia, director of the Downtown Business Association, said that the vitality of storefronts was important for a successful downtown.

“One of the reasons why some of the buildings haven’t done well is because of the lack of detail to retail space,” she said. “It’s squeezed in at the last minute.”

At Badhia’s urging the subcommittee added “street-level commercial spaces” to the list of factors which would encourage appropriate new development downtown.

Travis also said that although downtown Berkeley had many historic resources that should be protected by the LPC under existing laws, ordinances and procedures, there was also an abundance of undistinguished buildings and underutilized properties.

“These resources represent our best opportunity for changing the face of downtown and making it into the attractive, innovative, prosperous and sustainable community we all want.”

Travis criticized the LPC and said that there was nothing in the commission’s charter, experience or expertise that suggested that it was the best institution to act as an advocate for change and the catalyst to stimulate downtown.

“All new development must be of the highest quality so that one day it too will become an historic landmark,” he said. “The best way to achieve this is to set clear use, height, and appearance standards. The Zoning Adjustments Board had the primary responsibility for administering these standards. No compelling argument has been advanced as to why it would be better for the LPC to do this job downtown than for the ZAB to continue to do it. In fact, your subcommittee has often noted that the LPC has not been able to carry out all of its current responsibilities.”

Doug Buckwald performed a song titled “Hello DAPAC” to the tune of “Hello Dolly.”

“It’s sad we have lost as much as we have of what we have downtown,” he said. “The main thing that governs any district’s character is history, otherwise they are all the same.”

The DAPAC subcommittee has been meeting for over a year now to work on historic preservation issues for the Downtown Plan.

After working with the Architectual Resources Group on a study of existing buildings, the project was turned into a context statement for the environment review process.

Later, staff also asked the subcommittee to rate the integrity of each building so that the LPC could determine whether or not it should be protected so that developers had some knowledge of which buildings were eligible to be demolished.

After the subcommittee rejected the focus, it decided to develop the historic preservation chapter for the Downtown Area Plan instead.

Oakland Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB45 Oakland school bill passed the Senate Appropriations Committee on a 10-7 vote on Thursday afternoon, bringing the Oakland Unified School District a step closer to possible return to full local control.

Swanson’s bill, which earlier passed both the full Assembly and the Senate Education Committee, would put full discretion for return to local control of the Oakland district in the hands of the state-funded, Bakersfield-based Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) rather than at the discretion of State Superintendent Jack O’Connell.

Swanson believes that this will speed up a return to local control of the Oakland schools.

Earlier this year, two years after FCMAT recommended it and after Swanson had introduced his AB45 local control bill, O’Connell returned local control to the Oakland school board in the areas of community relations and governance.

All other aspect of Oakland school district operations, including district control, have been in the hands of state administrators hired by O’Connell since the state seized control of OUSD in 2003.

AB45, which is opposed by O’Connell, still has two major hurdles to cross. The first is passage in the full senate, where it is being managed by State Senate President Don Perata, the author of the originale 2003 OUSD takeover legislation that AB45 seeks to modify.

If the bill passes the senate, it then needs the signature of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to become law. Because the bill has gotten limited Republican support during its consideration in the legislature, a two-thirds vote to overcome a possible Schwarzenegger veto is considered all but impossible.

Earlier this year, Swanson said that he had made amendments to the bill that answered concerns raised by the governor’s office. But Schwarzenegger has not yet said whether or not he will sign AB45 as amended.

Each August, fans of many top-ranked college football teams sit down to scrutinize an all-important statistic.

How many first-string players on their favorite squads are confronting criminal or academic troubles serious enough to prevent them from playing in the home opener?

Berkeley has to do things differently, though. Here, the players on Cal’s team—ranked 12th nationally in pre-season—are legitimate, but the future of the stadium is in court.

2006 seemed to be the last season before major change at Memorial Stadium. All expectations were that construction would begin on the first phase of a multi-stage expansion and retrofit of facilities.

Little did I expect that following the 2006 Big Game, protesters would climb into oak and redwood trees next to the stadium, that some of them would still be there as opening day approached a year later, that construction would still be in the future—although a lot of actual trenches have been dug and symbolic lines in the sand drawn—or that a former Cal football player would, as Mayor of Berkeley, be leading the lawsuits.

I’m not going to speculate about the legal issues, which seem headed for their next court hearing in mid-September, nor discuss the changes to the Stadium. (Disclosure: I work for the university in an office that has been involved with the stadium planning).

I am interested, though, in how Golden Bear football is evolving beyond facilities. Cal football now seems to be a consistent national contender for the first time since Coach Pappy Waldorf hung up his sport coat five decades ago.

A Sports Illustrated writer labeled Saturday’s Cal-Tennessee contest as the “the best game on college football’s opening weekend” and ranked both it and this season’s Cal-USC match-up as among the top 20 games to watch in 2007.

In five seasons at Cal, current Head Coach Jeff Tedford and his staff have raised expectations that high. Tedford teams have beaten formidable opponents, never lost to now hapless Stanford, and compiled a respectable 43-20 record including two seasons with ten wins each.

A pre-season Top-20 ranking and a post-season bowl game—and bowl win—for Cal are now annually expected and there are localized fevered eruptions of speculation about national championships.

But, after last year’s season-opening loss to Tennessee and a third consecutive loss to USC in 2006, Cal fans can’t indefinitely dine out on the glory of ten-win seasons or having been one of the last teams to beat USC (in 2003).

If Cal doesn’t beat one of the two, and preferably both Tennessee and USC, this season perfectionist critics may carp that the Bears still can’t win the biggest games, not withstanding their recent dominance of the Big Game.

The Big Game, of course, remains the sine qua non for any Cal fan older than, say, 25. Even when the rest of the season goes south, a Big Game victory is still counted upon to ease the disappointment.

Here, Tedford is on especially solid ground. The last Cal head coach with a good overall record is still regarded by some Cal fans as Bruce “couldn’t win a Big Game” Snyder. Tedford’s teams, in contrast, have run all over the Cardinal in recent years and a full Stanford class has come and gone without getting near the Axe trophy.

As Cal’s star as risen, Stanford has gone into eclipse. A significantly scaled down new Stanford Stadium still doesn’t fill up and an eleven loss Cardinal season in 2006 was preceded by a 2005 death march when Stanford lost to not one, but three, UC schools; Cal, UCLA, and UC Davis.

Still, Stanford leads in overall Big Game wins and points scored, and Cal has a long way to go to even the long-term record. And Stanford has had one form of enduring revenge this season.

For most of the 20th century many individual Cal fans held to a cherished tradition, “consecutive Big Game attendance” (my attendance at 28 of the past 29 Big Games is very unremarkable as these things go).

By shrinking its stadium and limiting the number of tickets available to the visiting team, Stanford has now permanently shut out tens of thousands of Cal fans. Most will not be able to make the trek to Palo Alto every two years unless they buy both Cal and Stanford season tickets, and “consecutive Big Games in Berkeley” might become the default standard.

In recent years I’ve also heard Cal students speak heresy; compared to winning a national championship or beating a #1 team the Big Game is just another game. If the Golden Bears continue to win, that talk will increase, as will expectations for the rest of the schedule.

Tedford, in his sixth season, is approaching an important milestone. Pappy Waldorf was the last—and only—Cal coach to have several consecutive seasons of great success.

From 1947 to 1952, Waldorf teams won no less than seven times a season and twice posted 10-1 and 9-1 records.

Andy Smith might have achieved a higher pinnacle but he died not long after coaching the best five seasons in Cal history, a staggering 44 game winning streak from 1920 to 1924, flanked by otherwise quite respectable 6-2, 6-2, and 6-3 seasons.

Waldorf and Smith coached Cal for ten years apiece. If Tedford reaches a decade continuing his success to date, he will have reason to claim to be the best long-term coach in Cal history, although some might still put an asterisk after that until his teams win not only a clear-cut Pac-10 championship but also make a Rose Bowl appearance.

(Waldorf’s teams had three conference championships and three Rose Bowl losses. Smith’s teams went to the Rose Bowl twice, lost once.)

Current success has literally come at a price for Cal fans. Ticket costs have risen. Cal was asking—and got—a whopping $66 each for now sold out single-game USC and Tennessee tickets this season.

But price increases don’t seem to have dampened sales. This year, mid-August more than 40,000 season tickets had been purchased, a fourth consecutive year of record sales.

Average game attendance exceeded 64,000 last year, meaning Memorial Stadium was nearly full for most games.

And how will those crowds behave? This season Cal fans need to show they can handle consistent success gracefully, not edge towards the sort of Ugly Athleticism and arrogance that accrues around many top-ranked teams.

Cal is in a unique situation. No other American university—with the possible exception of Cal’s “Brother Bruin”, UCLA—can claim, this decade at least, to be consistently top ranked in academics and football. In other words, it’s Nobels but No Bowls, except at UC campuses.

One mixed result of football success has been the near demise of the afternoon home game at Memorial Stadium. For West Coast teams, getting television exposure often means accepting late day game slots.

The earliest announced starting time for a 2007 home game is 3:30 p.m., and some appear likely to start at 5:00 or even 7:00, meaning that homeward bound fans may be clogging the streets of Berkeley as late as ten or eleven on a Saturday night.

While I mourn the loss of sunny September and October Saturday afternoons at Memorial, many Bay Area Cal fans seem to appreciate having Saturday morning to do other things, like soccer games for the kids, before heading off to Berkeley for late afternoon or evening football.

Last Thursday evening I sat in Memorial Stadium after a special practice, as a Cal player lead hundreds of student rooters in chants of “Whose House? Our House!” Just beyond the Stadium wall a “Save the Oaks!” tree house was visible atop a truncated conifer.

Come tomorrow, the new season kicks off and Berkeley will eventually see which vision has built a more durable home.

For information on Cal football, including tickets and home game

information: calbears.cstv.com/sports/m-footbl.

Steven Finacom attended his first Cal football game in 1975 and has written about Cal football twice before for the Daily Planet.

Photograph by Steven Finacom.

The California Marching Band blasts out a fanfare as the team leaves the field during a Thursday, Aug. 23, evening practice and rally at Memorial Stadium.

It began with a flimsy yellow ribbon and ended with a riot, two arrests and a courtroom hearing.

At about 6 a.m. Wednesday, the UC Berkeley Police Department started taping off the oak grove adjacent to the UC Berkeley Memorial Stadium to construct an eight-foot chain-link fence around the grove. Protesters have been camped in the trees since December in an effort to stop the university’s plan to remove the trees to make room for a new athletic facility.

A scuffle between the UC police and protesters during a Wednesday evening rally held by Save the Oaks turned into a riot when the police confiscated food and water which was being sent up to the tree-sitters.

UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof told the Planet that the temporary fence would create a “safety zone around trees adjacent to Memorial Stadium” to protect both the tree-sitters and the 73,000 fans who are expected at the stadium for Saturday’s football game against University of Tennessee.

The tree-sitters are protesting the university’s plan to raze the grove to make way for a $125 million student-athlete high performance center in its place, a move that led the City of Berkeley to sue the university over safety concerns.

“Emotions and passions are running high on both ends,” Mogulof told the Planet. “A temporary barrier is needed because protesters continue to illegally occupy some trees at the site and investigations by the UC police have suggested that it would be a good idea to put a fence up before fans come to the game. We are going to analyze this on a week-to-week basis.”

Assistant UC Police Chief Mitch Celaya told the Planet Wednesday afternoon that the tree-sitters had been asked to come down before university-hired contractors had started constructing the fence.

“They made a choice,” Celaya said. “We are not trying to start a riot. We are just trying to prevent potential problems. We don’t want the football fans to walk into the [grove]. We are not allowing anybody to go in and if anyone tries to leave or provide food or water to the tree-sitters they will be cited for trespassing.”

Steve Volker, attorney for the California Oaks Foundation—one of the three plaintiffs in the lawsuit against UC’s plans to construct the training center—arrived at the grove Wednesday to inform protesters that he had filed a restraining order for the fence which would be heard Thursday (today) at the Hayward Superior Court.

“This fence is contrary to Judge Barbara Miller’s ruling on Feb. 9 that there should be no physical alteration on the environment of the oak grove until the court rules on the merits of the case on Sept. 19,” he said. “It is a direct attack on fundamental rights, a noose on the First Amendment ... Berkeley is the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and it now threatens to be its graveyard. This day will be remembered as a day of infamy for this university as an attempt to crush the community’s voice.”

Citing a similar case at Cornell University where the court had upheld a student’s right to remain on a tree to protest its being cut down, Volker said that courts have repeatedly ruled that no one should be deprived of their civil rights—food and water in this case—on a college campus.

“The sitters have a constitutional right to protest the logging of the tress,” he said. “They have placed themselves in harm’s way to protect these trees. We either make a stand now or watch our rights disappear.”

The first altercation took place when the tree-sitters got down to the lower branches and one of their supporters tried to attach a can of guacamole to a bag lowered with ropes. UC police cut the rope off with a sickle while an angry group of people surrounded them screaming “shame on you.”

“Fuck you Pigs,” said one of the protesters. “What are the rules? We will get food up there one way or the other.”

At one point supporters started throwing apples and granola bars inside the fence while others continued attempts to tie bottles of water and food packets to the ropes lowered from the trees.

Celaya said the police were preventing food and water from being sent up to the trees since the sitters were already stockpiled with supplies.

After observing the situation at the grove, Mayor Tom Bates said in a statement, “While the university may have serious concerns about the safety of the protesters and football fans at Saturday’s game, there is simply no justification for UC Berkeley Police to deny protesters food and water.”

“UC’s actions are unacceptable and I believe they are putting people’s lives at risk unnecessarily,” Bates said. “I contacted the chancellor’s office to urge them in the strongest possible terms to reconsider their position and allow the protesters access to food and water. Regardless of a person’s opinion of the merits of the tree-sitters protest or the UC stadium proposal, we all need to respect basic human and civil rights.”

Close to 6 p.m. students, community members and a few city officials gathered outside the fence to watch the tug-of-war between the tree-sitters and UC police. After about half a dozen attempts to prevent the protesters from handing over more food, UC police made two arrests.

Celaya said that Joseph Fisher, 18, was arrested on two counts of battery and one count of resisting arrest and Drew Beres, 18, could be charged with one count of resisting arrest. Nobody was injured.

The arrests led to more pushing, yelling and general chaos at the grove. At one point police chased a man dressed in black down Piedmont Avenue. Some protesters formed a circle in front of the evening traffic and refused to budge from the spot for almost 15 minutes.

“Cut your engine off,” one woman told a driver of a silver Toyota. “You are not going anywhere.”

“Berkeley’s back,” yelled another oak grove supporters. Drum beats echoed in the distance and strains from the UC football band practicing for Saturday’s game added to the melee of sounds at the grove.

“They are attempting to deny the protesters food and water to starve them out of the trees,” said former mayoral candidate Zachary Runningwolf, who was one of the initial tree-sitters. “There are many measures that can be done to control crowds. They say they are protecting the sitters but are refusing them their fundamental rights at the same time.”

“We shall overcome,” sang Berkeley resident Debbie Moore strumming a guitar as she stood wrapped in yellow police tape to show her support for what might be the longest-standing urban tree-sit.

“How much did that fence cost?” asked Jonathan Huang, a UC Berkeley sophomore.

“That’s my out-of-state tuition money that’s going to build a fence,” said another UC Berkeley student. “My parents worked their butts off to pay the $40,000 a year and this is what I get! I am pissed off!”

As evening paved the way for night, the UC cops pulled out six generators and 25 spotlights. A thick yellow rope was let down for water, but this time the police did not attempt to block it.

“I think our response will be summed up in one word: De-fence,” a masked tree-sitter told media news crews from his leafy perch. “The tree sitters and UC are too polarized and it’s hard to bridge that gap.”

Amy Elmgren, a peace and conflict studies major from UC Berkeley, pressed her nose against the fence to watch the UC police officers videotaping the tree-sitters.

“I think this is insane,” she said. “Before today I was ambiguous about what was going on at the grove but this certainly changes it. I am hoping this will reinvigorate student activism on campus.”

Gianna Ranuzzi, a long-time Berkeley resident, said she was worried that the poles were damaging the tree roots.

Catcalls, boos and whistles followed the police as they patrolled the grove. The crowds started thinning around 7 p.m.

The next scheduled showdown will be the lawsuit scheduled to be heard on Sept. 19.

In a statement released Wednesday afternoon Mayor Bates said that he was open to negotiations for a settlement agreement regarding the lawsuit.

“From the beginning, I have maintained that a negotiated settlement that addresses our significant public safety and legal issues is a preferred outcome,” he said. “It is regrettable that the university made no offer at the court-mandated settlement conference in February and has yet to submit any settlement offer to the city in this litigation. In fact, the university’s lawyers have at all times urged that this case be expedited to a court resolution. The university sent a letter to the City Council and me last month with an update on their plans—including modest changes such as a reduction in their new parking lot and improved landscaping—but made no offer to negotiate.”

The statement however issues a caveat that the city was one of four entities engaged in legal action over the university’s proposed stadium projects and “even if the city were to reach an acceptable resolution, the lawsuit would likely continue.”

UC Berkeley officials have emphasized the importance of a new gym for its 13 athletic teams to replace the seismically unsafe Memorial Stadium, but the city contends that the proposed site is unsafe since it located on the Hayward Fault.

The Berkeley City Council is scheduled to meet in closed session with its lawyers on Tuesday to discuss the litigation. Bates has requested the university to provide information about a settlement agreement to the city’s attorneys so that the council is able to consider it.

When Berkeley High starts on Wednesday, school officials are hoping there will be no need this year for “zoo time,” as the beginning-of-the-school-year pandemonium at Berkeley High is commonly known, with students clamoring for books, calendars and lockers.

When students get back from summer break this time, they will saunter straight to class and get to work. Or at least that is the way it is supposed to work.

Vice Principal Pasquale Scuderi’s new rules dictate that students should have picked up their back-to-school classroom essentials during registration days last week.

“So that when the first day of school starts, we can be ready for class and not waste a single minute,” said Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp during senior registration Friday. “We’ve wasted a lot of time standing in queues in the past, but not anymore. The new school year will start on time.”

The new idea was implemented for the first time last year.

“This is a slight improvement on last year,” Scuderi said. “I was given a clean slate to try and see that kids don’t wait in long lines and don’t get their time wasted. So we looked at the layout of the campus and divided them into small groups. It’s a lot of hard work for four days but it’s worth every minute.”

He added that the latest addition to Berkeley High was a talented group of 24 new teachers.

“That, and the success of our athletic team,” he said. “Coach [Alonzo] Carter has doubled the participation in football. He also keeps his players’ transcripts with him which will help the athletic program have a bigger take on academics.”

Although only 47 percent of sophomores and 48 percent of juniors at BHS scored proficient or advanced in English in the recent STAR test results, the numbers are above the statewide scores. The STAR program tests proficiency levels in English and math for every student in California according to one of five levels of performance on the California Standardized Tests for each subject tested: advanced, proficient, basic, below basic, and far below basic.

“It’s important to keep in mind that STAR is a nice method but it’s one of several methods,” Scuderi said. “There are lots of assessments that we do on campus that test students more intimately. That gives us more relevant data than state tests. Students in our core humanities programs are now doing self assessments.”

Slemp added that an advocacy program would start at Berkeley High from fall 2006 where every student would have an adult to go to for advice.

Hundreds of Berkeley High seniors picked up books and ID cards on Friday.

“It’s been extremely smooth since morning,” said Jun-Ko Kenmotsu, a parent volunteer who was handing out yellow monogrammed organizers.

“The organizers cost $2 for every student,” said former BHS parent Linda Perry who has been volunteering during registration day for the last 15 years.

“It’s a fraction of the actual cost. The rest is paid for by donations. Principal Slemp is very enthusiastic about using them as it helps to keep track of class and their social lives as well.”

The lines moved as if by clockwork, guided by the ever-watchful eyes of the parent-volunteers.

Berkeley High volunteer coordinator Janet Huseby said the 130 volunteers helped make sure the school year began smoothly.

“These people gave up work and squeezed in their last hours of vacation to contribute to the community,” she said. “That is just amazing.”

Corinne Koster, a portrait photographer with the ABC School’s Project, said that things had moved quickly.

“I was able to take a hundred portraits since morning,” she said, “and apart from concerns about their hair and looks, the students have been just great.”

Seniors Giana Cirolia, Kara Murray and Samantha Carter were up next.

“It’s exciting,” said Giana, 17. “You’ve been waiting your entire four years in high school for this and now it’s here. [The class of] ’08 has always been the best class and this is going to be the best class ever.”

“I am looking forward to Dance Production,” said Samantha. “I am not looking forward to college applications but it’s a goal.”

As friends found each other during the day, discussions generally focused on the challenges of a new school year.

“I am looking forward to moving on to better things,” said incoming senior Zoe Janackek. “Senior year is always stressful but it’s also the best. I really want to keep my grades up and work towards getting into a good college.”

A group of Berkeley residents are questioning why the windows of a building at 1050 Parker St. are being dismantled prior to the building getting a demolition use permit from the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB). Demolition permits for any building over 40 years old in a commercial zone must first be reviewed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission to determine whether it has any historic significance.

Neighborhood business owners and residents said they were perplexed when the tall metal-sash multi-light windows went missing from the unoccupied one-story World War II-era building last month.

Choyce, who heads Jubilee Restoration—the charitable arm of Berkeley’s Missionary Church of God in Christ—had purchased the property along with several others to demolish them all and build Jubilee Village, a large affordable housing project.

The project stalled in 2004 due to an investigation into Jubilee and the federal government withdrawing funding for the project. It was alleged at the time that the organization had been diverting federal funds.

Wareham, who own the Fantasy Records building on Tenth Street, has recently applied for a demolition permit for the site, leading to speculation that the dismantling of the windows might serve a larger purpose.

“It’s obvious to me that someone is attempting to take away any character-defining features from the building so that they can get the demolition permit,” said Berkeley Landmarks Commissioner Carrie Olson, “so that when it comes before the Landmarks Commission, we will say, ‘Oh what a dump’ and approve the permit.”

Darrell de Tienne, who is representing Wareham, told the Planet Thursday that the windows were removed as part of an abatement process.

“We had to do it to remove the asbestos from the building,” he said. “We have not started demolishing anything yet.”

De Tienne said that there were no concrete plans for the site after the building is demolished.

“It’s possible that it could be linked to Fantasy Records and used for parking or something,” he said.

Laurie Bright, who owns the neighboring D & L Engines, said that the demolition had taken place during the night.

“I am extremely suspicious of what’s going on,” he said. “The building’s been sitting there for four years and it has never been vandalized. Then suddenly someone starts tearing down the windows. It’s sitting there empty, open to weather, vandalism and graffiti. There’s nothing left but the shell. Any chance to re-use the building is lost.”

Olson told the Planet that she had requested a stop-work order from the city’s Code Enforcement Division last week.

Wendy Cosin, Berkeley’s deputy planning director, told the Planet that a staff shortage had prevented the order from being sent out.

“It’s my belief that there’s no work going on there now,” she said.

Photograph by Richard Brenneman.

Demolition work on the windows of this World War II-era building at Tenth and Parker streets has drawn criticism.

Cell phone giant Verizon Wireless filed a lawsuit against the City of Berkeley in the Federal Court of Oakland last week for allegedly being in violation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Verizon asked the court to declare Berkeley’s ordinance regarding cell phone antenna installations illegal and to allow the cell phone company to proceed with three of its antenna location permits, including the one atop UC Storage at 2721 Shattuck Ave.

The other two locations are on lower University and north Shattuck avenues.

The Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) voted 5-4 in July to reject a use permit application by Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communications for 11 cell phone antennas atop UC storage, following a second remand from the City Council in May.

ZAB’s decision stated that it was “unable to make the necessary finding based on substantial evidence that the towers were necessary to provide personal wireless service in the coverage area, since service is currently being provided and since no evidence has been presented that existing service is not at an adequate level.”

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires cities to grant cell phone companies a permit within a reasonable period of time and allows the carrier to sue for unnecessary delay.

The other thrust of the law states that a city violates federal law on its face by creating an overly burdensome ordinance which includes demonstrating necessity for use of the site.

San Diego’s ordinance regarding cell phone antennas was recently thrown out by Sprint because it was found to be “overly burdensome.”

The proposal, which was first remanded to ZAB by the City Council on Sept. 26, 2006, had raised health concerns among the neighbors.

Citing the Telecommunications Act, which prohibits local governments from rejecting wireless facilities based on health concerns as long as the stations conform to Federal Communication standards, the council had asked ZAB to make a decision based on third-party engineering review, parking concerns and illegal construction instead of health.

ZAB voted 6-3 to deny the construction of 18 cell phone antennas at the Jan. 30 board meeting. Both Verizon and Nextel appealed to the City Council and a public hearing was held in May.

In a confidential memo to ZAB, City attorney Manuela Albuquerque had warned that a rejection of the Verizon application would be a violation of state and federal law.

The Planet was unable to get a comment from the city attorney’s office by press time.

Verizon land use attorney Paul Albritton had told the board at the July meeting that statistics showed that minutes of cell phone usage in Berkeley had increased between 2005 and 2006.

“There really is hard evidence which shows that down the line cell phone lines will not work when there is a congestion,” he said.

Can the once-promising political future of Oakland Unified School District board member Chris Dobbins survive the recent scandal and censure? To quote the most trite of answers: Only time will tell.

Before he was accused of conducting an improper relationship with a 17-year-old female OUSD high school student, the 35-year-old Dobbins was considered one of Oakland’s rising political stars.

The UC Berkeley graduate and educational professional was easily elected to the school board in June of 2006 to replace the retiring District 6 Director Dan Siegel, easily beating local business owner Wandra J. Boyd 52-48 percent. In doing so, he assembled an impressive list of endorsements, including the incumbent Siegel, the powerful Oakland Education Association teachers union and its then-president, Ben Visnick, the Alameda County Democratic Party, and several members of the board of the Oakland Unified School District and the Alameda County Board of Education.

But maybe more important for someone seeking a larger political future in Oakland—where the ability to cross over racial lines is a necessity for anyone seeking citywide office—Dobbins, who is of mixed Irish-Syrian/Lebanese heritage, was able to garner key African-American endorsements and support against an African-American opponent.

And Dobbins, apparently, had his eyes set on citywide office.

Oakland resident Ignacio Ortiz, who spoke in support of Dobbins at last week’s OUSD censure meeting, said he met Dobbins when the two of them were food servers at Chevy’s. “He said he was interested in running for office, and I told him I’d do anything to help him,” Ortiz said. “And he said, ‘What if I ran for mayor?’”

Whether Dobbins still holds that ambition is not known.

Dobbins’ election last June went little noticed outside of the 6th District of Oakland, in part because the Oakland school board was still a powerless position at the time in those days of full state control, in part because anything about the Oakland election in 2006 was overshadowed by the epic mayoral battle between former Congressmember Ron Dellums and Councilmembers Ignacio De La Fuente and Nancy Nadel.

But Dobbins came to citywide attention during last January’s much-watched Fox Oakland citywide inauguration, not so much for what he said in his speech—which was full of the usual thank-you’s and political promises—but of the boyishly, bubblingly enthusiastic way in which he gave it. Oakland, which has had more than its share of politicians giving out grim news from the state school takeover to the epidemic of murders, appeared ready for an officeholder who seemed to clearly be having so much fun on the job.

That support carried over to Dobbins’ board colleagues. Contrary to the charges made by Dobbins’ supporters at last week’s censure meeting that the censure was a “political vendetta,” Dobbins appeared to have been well-liked by fellow board members before the student impropriety charges surfaced.

In a board that has seen some legendary political feuds in recent years—the running one featuring former members Dan Siegel and Paul Cobb being one of the more memorable—Dobbins appeared to have no enemies. (Significantly, Cobb, a longtime local African-American activist and most recently the new publisher of the Oakland Post, an African-American-based newspaper, joined Siegel in endorsing Dobbins in the June 2006 election.)

Even local educator and political leader Toni Cook, who preceded Siegel in the 6th District OUSD board seat, began her remarks during the public comment section at last week’s board censure meeting with the statements, “I like Chris,” and “I know about the good work he has done,” before announcing her support for the censure.

“You should not be blinded in your judgment by his good works,” Cook told board members. “Any perceived relationship with a minor is wrong, regardless of his intentions. In eight years while I was on the board, we had three cases of employees who had similar charges against them. One went to jail and two were suspended. There can’t be one standard in the district for employees and another one for the board.”

But Cook, after all, was one of the signators on the petition of candidacy for Wandra J. Boyd, Dobbins’ opponent in last year’s election. If Dobbins decides to continue his political career past his current term, will his personal “likeability” be enough to overcome the current scandal and censure in voters who supported him last year, or for those who may never have taken a position on him before?

Retired OUSD board member Dan Siegel thinks so.

“I think he can rebound,” Siegel said by telephone this week, “though it may take time. Clearly he made an error. He and the young woman allowed their infatuation to go on a bit too far. But from all the available evidence, it did not cross the line into a physical relationship, and (Dobbins) did not do anything that could be considered abusive or exploitative of a young person. If he does not resign, it will be a matter he can put behind him.”

“Oakland voters tend to have a short memory,” Handa said. “Transgressions tend not to come back to haunt politicians.” Handa added that while “it can depend upon how much an opponent uses the information in a negative campaign,” he said that in this area, at least, “negative campaigning can backfire.”

Handa said that the charges against Dobbins may have been politically nullified, in part, because some board members made statements prior to the investigation that showed they had already made up their minds against him. And Handa said that e-mail excerpts which were published in the censure committee’s report—in one of which, Dobbins wrote to the student that “I have a girlfriend so I should not have been trying stuff in the first place”—might not turn out to be politically damaging if voters feel they were cherrypicked by the committee and taken out of context.

“I’ve talked to some parents already who see this as a witch hunt,” Handa said.

That Dobbins may be able to put the issue behind him appears to be true, at least with his hard-core supporters. A crowd of them packed the OUSD board room during the censure meeting, several of them speaking passionately in his support or in criticism of his fellow board members, the rest applauding loudly when they heard something in Dobbins’ favor, or groaning or calling out remarks when they heard something against him. These supporters heard the allegations against Dobbins and rejected them, and, for the most part, will probably remain in his corner for whatever campaign he chooses to run in the future.

Typical of those was Lolita Morelli, Dobbins’ seventh-grade counselor at Montera Middle School, who called Dobbins “an outstanding individual,” a “moral and ethical person” who Morelli said she imagined “was trying to help” the female student in question.

And, in fact, Bay Area voters have shown a tendency to continue to support local office holders who have been found guilty of improprieties.

Earlier this year, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign manager quit after accusing Newsom of having an affair with his wife. Some observers said this was the end of Newsom’s rising star political career. Instead, seven months later, Newsom is as popular as ever, sailing along in his re-election campaign with no serious opposition, having scared off any of the progressive candidates who had once considered challenging him.

That was also the case with Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, who had barely won office in 2002 when it came to public light that in the last days of his campaign against incumbent Shirley Dean, Bates had stolen from the newsstand more than a thousand copies of the Daily Cal newspaper edition that included an endorsement of Dean. Four years later, Bates easily won re-election.

And California Attorney General Jerry Brown, who illegally trashed many of his official records and correspondence as mayor of Oakland on his way out the door at Oakland City Hall this year, seems so far to have suffered no lasting political damage from the action.

But Newsom, Bates, and Brown were all well-known officeholders with long records of political accomplishments. A majority of voters had formed favorable opinions of them long before their improprieties, one of the key elements in a politician overcoming such problems.

A second factor, in the Newsom and Bates situations, at least, is a quick and (apparently) sincere apology. Both Newsom and Bates almost immediately admitted wrongdoing, and took their respective punishments (rehab in the case of Newsom, a fine in the case of Bates) without complaint. Though Brown does not appear to have publicly addressed the document—trashing himsel—and has certainly issued no apology, an aide with the attorney general’s office immediately issued a public statement acknowledging that the trashing had occurred.

It is unclear whether future voters will consider Dobbins’ impropriety more serious than that of the others. At the very least, Dobbins is guilty of a failure to break off a relationship with an underage student he was mentoring immediately after it was clear the relationship had strayed into romantic waters, picking her up from her UC dorm room at 2 a.m. and parking with her in his car at Strawberry Canyon a month after he had promised OUSD staff members that he would not see the girl any more. Voters may believe this more damaging than a consensual adult relationship, or destroying newspapers or documents, or they may not.

Meanwhile, unlike Newsom, Bates, and Brown, the first-termer Dobbins does not have a long political record to fall back on. While his continued hard core support in the 6th District would make him a formidable candidate should he choose to run for re-election in 2010, and a large cadre of family and friends and associates outside the district would be expected to support him whatever he does, he would find that most citywide voters’ knowledge of him will now begin with the question, “Wasn’t that the one who went with that high school girl?” That’s a first impression that will be difficult to overcome.

Dobbins’ second difficulty in emulating the swift political resurrection of fellow fallen officeholders is the fact that he never issued an unequivocal apology.

At the first news conference following the revelation of the charges of sleeping with his campaign manager’s wife, Newsom said, simply, “I want to make it clear that everything you’ve heard and read is true, and I’m deeply sorry about that. I’ve hurt someone I care deeply about—Alex Tourk and his friends and family. And that is something I have to live with.”

Bates did the same, issuing a statement that read: “There is no question that tossing newspapers is absolutely inappropriate and unacceptable. I apologize on behalf of myself and my supporters for our involvement in this activity.”

In contrast, Dobbins equivocated.

“I could have used better judgment,” he told fellow board members at the censure meeting, adding that “if [the student involved] felt I overstepped my bounds, then I apologize for that.”

But rather than leaving it at that, he then tried to criticize his detractors and minimize his actions, first saying that he had been censured when other OUSD board members had not for other infractions, then adding that “at the end of the day, I didn’t steal any money or anything like that.”

Because of that, privately, following the meeting, several board members—including moderates who did not publicly speak out against Dobbins prior to the investigation was completed—complained that “he still doesn’t get it,” and unless and until that sentiment changes, both with Dobbins and with his closest observers, it will be remembered, making any possible future political campaign beyond the 6th District start off with an enormous impediment to climb and overcome.

Contributed photo.

At last week’s special board meeting, embattled OUSD Boardmember Chris Dobbins examines the resolution against him that was released by the board’s Censure Committee (Alice Spearman, Noel Gallo and chair Greg Hodge).

Air monitors set up by a group of West Berkeley residents in May to detect emissions from Pacific Steel Casting (PSC) reveal high levels of toxic metals nickel and manganese.

The group, which calls itself the Berkeley Community Monitoring Team, is scheduled to present its results at a press conference at a monitoring site on Eighth Street today (Tuesday).

Pacific Steel contends that the test results are inconclusive and misleading.

“The results as published by the Berkeley Community Monitoring Team ignore data that does not fit its preconceptions,” a statement issued by PSC said. “The team singles out PSC as the sole source of emissions when air samples tested are cumulative of all sources (including Highway 80) in the industrial neighborhood of West Berkeley. The air monitoring machine is not approved by the EPA, results are not verified by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and the machine has limited capability in detecting small amounts of individual metals.”

Located at 1333 Second St., PSC produces steel castings that are used in various industries. Area residents have complained for years about its noxious odors and emissions which they call a health risk.

“These are preliminary findings but one of the goals is to daylight our monitoring project and encourage other people to stand up on their roofs and put up a monitor,” said L A Wood, who is part of the team. “We went into it with some basic assumptions. Some of the prior sampling by the West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs show traces of formaldehyde and lead and this raised questions in the community. I think our results will seriously challenge Pacific Steel’s Health Risk Assessment Report and urge them to take another look at it.”

Pacific Steel presented its Health Risk Assessment report to the air district last month. The report—which is yet to be released to the public—will help determine whether the steel foundry poses a health risk to Berkeley residents.

Wood added that while the air district had supported their project, Pacific Steel had not cooperated.

“We wanted to know their times of operation but were unable to do so,” he said. “We knew it was primarily at night so we based our sampling on that assumption. One of the main indicators was the smell. Every time you talk about West Berkeley emissions, the city government has pointed to the freeway. But this has more to do with all the industries in West Berkeley than the freeway. There’s a reason why the air district gave us the money for the monitors. They know that something is wrong at the steel foundry.”

The preliminary results from the community air monitor are based on two dozen samples. The final report will be released after 100 air tests have been completed.

“These test results are even more proof that Pacific Steel must immediately stop its pollution that threatens the health of the community,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. “The health of residents is more important than corporate profits.”

According to Mark Cherniak, an independent international health expert, the levels of nickel and manganese found in the samples taken near the West Berkeley steel foundry were hundreds of times higher than considered safe by the World Health Organization (WHO).

“The nearest and largest facility known to emit these metals is Pacific Steel,” said Wood.

“At the locations where monitoring found excessive levels of both manganese and nickel, these levels were found in proportions similar to PSC’s known emissions of these metals.”

Cherniak’s analysis stated: “The manganese levels at the 700 block of Gilman Street were four to five times the WHO’s guideline value for this contaminant while nickel levels at this location were 180 to 220 times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reference concentration for this contaminant.”

Additionally, “Manganese levels at the 600 block of Gilman Street and the 1300 block of 3rd Street were 10 to 20 times the WHO’s guideline value for this contaminant while nickel levels at these locations were up to 330 times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reference concentration for this contaminant.”

Cherniak also said that all that data from the sampling suggests that PSC was the source of these excessive levels of contaminants.

“By using a mobile monitoring station, we are for the first time getting an idea of the particular pollution coming from Pacific Steel,” Denny Larson, director of the non-profit Global Community Monitor, an organization that promotes environmental justice and human rights for communities, told the Planet.

“So far, complaints have always centered around odor. There has never been a comprehensive study of tiny particles eliminated from the foundry which people can’t smell or see. We want to put some scientifically incredible numbers to these particles so that people know how big of a health risk they can be. We are finally honing in on what is harmful.”

The Korean king kneels, hands clasped in a gesture of submission. Above him looms the Japanese empress, at the head of an armada and clad in full samurai armor with sword outstretched. His armies defeated and his lands occupied, the king swears his country’s eternal loyalty to the Japanese throne.

No, this is not a screenplay for some epic Korean drama, though it has all the elements. The scene comes from a 14th-century scroll depicting Japan’s legendary 6th-century conquest of Korea’s Silla Dynasty.

Part of the exhibit “Telling Tales” at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, the scroll has stirred controversy within the Korean community. It has also highlighted challenges the museum faces in drawing the line between art and history.

The exhibit, which continues until Oct. 21, is tellingly situated between the museum’s Japan and Korea sections. One enters the museum, named for chief benefactor and prominent Korean American Chong Moon Lee, and ascends to the second floor. Passing through a display of Japan’s artistic, religious, and military past, the visitor reaches the scroll in question, delicately placed between Japanese guns and Korean ceramics.

Not long after the exhibit opened in April, a series of editorials appeared in the Korean-language Korea Daily calling on its readers to protest the display. Koreans responded by sending in hundreds of letters to the museum, including one from the Korean consulate.

Young Kee Ju, editor of the Korea Daily, says that the exhibit is “problematic” because it “distorts the history of Korea’s relationship with Japan.” Although the painting is a piece of art, he says its antiquity lends its contents historical weight, particularly for viewers unaware of Korea’s past.

For this reason, his paper called on the scroll to be removed, a move the museum viewed as tantamount to censorship. Instead, the museum provided additional information, clarifying the historical context surrounding the scroll’s fictional contents, which Ju found to be an appropriate resolution.

The dispute highlights the ongoing frustration of many Koreans who feel that Japan’s perspective of Asia remains the dominant one in the West.

Recently, a novel by Japanese author Yoko Kawashima Watkins was pulled from American classrooms following a wave of protests from Korean Americans who argued that the book conveyed a negative portrayal of Koreans under Japanese occupation. Issues of censorship arose, pitting artistic expression against historical representation.

These concerns are once again playing out through the Asian Art Museum’s exhibit.

At nearly 20 feet in length, the scroll is impressive. It depicts the legendary 6th-century Japanese Empress Jingu who, following the death of her husband, realizes the promise made by the island nation’s protector deity Hachiman by claiming Korea as part of a greater Japan.

Though myth, the tale formed a launching point for a version of Japanese history taught in classrooms well into the modern era. It has also played a central role in justifying two separate invasions of Korea, the first in the sixteenth century, and again in the twentieth, when Japan succeeded in colonizing the peninsula for over three decades. Japanese rule was justified as the fulfillment of ancient claims over Korea, as depicted in the scroll.

Not all Koreans, however, view the exhibit as historical. Taesoo Jeong, editor-in-chief of the Korea Times in San Francisco, emphasizes the scroll’s artistic value over its historical accuracy. Though he acknowledges the scroll’s potential in conveying a “false” impression of Korean history, he nevertheless defends its inclusion in the exhibit.

“It is ridiculous to put a work of art on trial,” Jeong wrote in a recent editorial. Artists in Korea routinely malign Japan, he says, adding that Koreans should be more reflective of their own attitudes before attacking this or any other piece of art.

The museum’s chief curator and organizer of the “Telling Tales” exhibit, Forrest McGill, says this particular painting was selected for its narrative qualities as an example of how Japan, and Asia in general, used art to depict stories. “The exhibit was not meant to be historical,” explains McGill, who says that the emphasis was on the painting’s elements of narrative animation, a theme intended to complement two other exhibits currently on display.

A quick glance at visitors’ comments, however, confirms Korean fears that what the museum intends may not be what viewers take away. One, from a Korean mother, complains that her child will gain a false view of Korean history as a result of the exhibit. Another reads, “History is not just what happened, but is also what people say happened.”

Violence, selfishness and insults have skyrocketed on national television since the first year of the war on terror, my second-grade students at Rosa Parks Elementary in Berkeley found.

For the last decade, I’ve had students analyze television preceding National TV-off week organized by the TV-Turnoff Network.

The mostly 7-year-old students are asked to collect all the data themselves since their teacher has never owned a television. An average total of 35 children’s television shows, both in Spanish and English, are studied for a period of seven days.

The first day of the study, as homework, students record how many times they see hitting, hurting or killing on half-hour segments of the shows they regularly watch, viewed from beginning to end. The second day, they are to focus on acts of selfishness; the third day, on instances of put-downs and the fourth day, on the number of times a typical class rule is broken.

Finally, in class, each of four groups of students compiles the data produced by the homework, focusing on one of the four variables in the study. But this year, when I pulled out old samples of graphs compiled by a class in April 2002 as models, the contrasts between the graphs produced five years ago and this April shocked my students.

“In a half hour of Jackie Chan in 2002 you would see hitting 10 times at most,” wrote gifted 7-year old Flynn Michael Legg. “In 2007, shows of Jackie Chan had 34 hitting scenes.”

For the 2001/2002 season—year one of President George Bush’s “war on terror”—nearly one-fourth of the television shows my students watched had one or no acts of violence at all in one half-hour. Now, of the shows they randomly watch, only That’s So Raven continues to have no violence, and all other shows have at least three instances of hitting or violence in one half-hour. Today, nearly half of shows randomly viewed by my students contain hitting or more violent acts seven to 34 times each half-hour.

The maximum number of gratuitous put-downs or insults has nearly doubled since 2002, going from 10 in That’s So Raven to 18 in Dumb and Dumber—over one put-down every two minutes. In Sponge Bob Square Pants, Flynn pointed out, one would hear at most two put-downs in 2002. Today it’s 16. No shows had more than 10 put-downs in 2002. Now three shows did (Sponge Bob: 16; Dumb and Dumber: 18; Letty La Fea: 13).

Very few shows have no insults at all any more. All the shows my students watched this year showed people or characters being selfish at least once in each half-hour. In 2002, only three shows had more than three acts of selfishness in a half hour. Now, 10 did. Half of the shows showed five to nine instances of selfishness each half hour.

Students also found that in April 2002, only one show depicted the violation of ordinary class rules (no hitting, put-downs, swearing, etc.) twelve or more times. In April of 2007, the number of such programs rose to six.

In 2001, the maximum times class rules were broken on a given half-hour show was 17 on one show. In 2007 the number of such shows has quadrupled with the maximum number of rules broken on a given show doubling or reaching over 34. These differences compelled us to substantiate our findings with Internet research. Indeed, children in the “yellow group” found that according to a 2007 study by the Parent’s Television Council (PTC) called “Dying to Entertain,” since 1998, violence on the ABC network has quadrupled (a 309 percent increase).

In 1998 the station had about one act of violence per hour (0.93). By 2007, it was almost four or 3.8 on average. CBS, according to the PTC study, had the highest percentage of deaths during 2005-6, with over 66 percent of violent scenes depicting death after 8 p.m. (www.parentstv.org).

Students in the “blue group” reading the same PTC study noted that now violence has shifted to being more central to the story with more graphic autopsy scenes or torture scenes. The study remarks that the 2005-6 season beginning in the fall was one of the most violent ever recorded by the PTC.

Precocious 7-year-old Maeve Gallagher reported in her essay: “The green group found kids will have seen 200,000 violent acts on television by age 18 … and 16,000 murders,” according to Real Vision, a project of the TV-Turnoff Network.

“Videos and TV are ‘teaching kids to like killing,’ according to a 1999 Senate Judiciary Committee Report entitled ‘Children, Violence and the Media,’” Maeve cited.

The Senate report also found that 10 percent of crimes committed are caused by violence seen on television. The findings by students in the red group convinced the rest of the class to limit their viewing of television, turning it off completely during the TV-Turnoff Network’s TV-off week—something they were reluctant to do when our unit of television study began.

What they discovered, largely thanks to the TV-Turnoff Network’s website (www.tvturnoff.org) is that there are more televisions (2.73) in the average home than people (2.55). The average home has a television on eight hours a day, more than was the case 10 years ago, asserts Nielsen (2006).

Children who watch six or more hours a day perform worse on reading tests than do those who watch one hour a day or don’t play video games, reports the Center for Screentime Awareness (www.screentime.org).

And by the time they finish high school, children will have spent more hours watching TV than in school. “I suspect the increase in television violents [sic] has something to do with the war on terror,” Andres Ventura hypothesized in his essay summing up his conclusions to the study. “By scaring kids and parents and pushing violents [sic], people are more likely to vote for war. The TV makes you dumb because if you see a lot it makes you forget things. It makes parents dumb too. It makes them forget how things were when they were kids.”

“If you watch too much TV when you are an adult, you lose the kid that is inside you,” Maeve Gallagher agreed.

“Watching television replaces your imagination with television thinking and there’s not much space left after that,” Daniel Hernandez-Deras, commented a few years ago.

One of the most shocking facts my students found was that according to the TV-Turnoff Network’s Real Vision project, parents spend only 38.5 minutes a day with their children in meaningful conversation.

And more than half of 4-6 years olds (54 percent) would rather watch TV than spend time with their parents. This finding inspired Alejandro González’s unique conclusion: “I think Jorge [sic] Bush wants to make people more scared. We know Jorge [sic] Bush likes war. And… TV makes you like more war. What’s scary is kids spend more time seeing TV than being with their dad. Since our study, I turn off the TV more and go play with my dad. Maybe the president used to watch more TV than being with his dad.”

Margot Pepper is a Mexican-born journalist and author whose work has been published internationally. Her memoir, Through the Wall: A Year in Havana, was a top nomination for the 2006 American Book Award.

At 2:34 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 25, a 47-year-old Berkeley woman called into report that she had been assaulted with a crowbar and robbed at the corner of Eighth and Heinz streets.

Car break-ins

There were a series of eight car break-ins around the UC Berkeley Campus and Telegraph Avenue area on Saturday. The break-ins occurred on the 2200 block of Parker Street, on the 1700 block of Curtis Street, at the corner of University Avenue and Curtis Street, on the 2200 block of Ashby Avenue, on the 2500 block of Chilton Street, on the 2400 block of Dana Street, on the 2100 block of Channing Way and on the 1900 block of Delaware Street.

Hot-prowl burglary

At 4:39 p.m. Saturday, a Berkeley man who lives on the 1500 block of Delaware called in to report that he had heard somebody break into his house while he was home. He heard somebody close the door and throw down the deadbolt. When he called out to the burglar, he fled.

Trash can

Around 4 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 26, somebody set a trashcan on fire on the 2100 block of Kittridge Street. There isn’t any suspect description.

Another hot-prowl burglary

A Berkeley woman called police at 5:43 a.m. Sunday to report that a teenager had broken into her house through an open window on the 2400 block of Blake Street. The police do not have anybody in custody.

Phony money

At 6:35 p.m. Sunday, an employee from Down Home Music, on the 1800 block of Fourth Street, called in to report that somebody had passed a fake $100 bill. No one was arrested.

Robbery

At 10:01 p.m. Sunday, three men robbed a Berkeley man on the 2000 block of Henry Street. No suspects have been identified.

Opinion

Editorials

For openers, whining (or whinging, if you’re British). I very seldom try to take a whole week off, and even then I try to fill this space via e-mail if I can. In fact, the last time I tried this, I was in Oxford when the University of California at Berkeley suckered one of its devoted alumni into letting them off the hook on the City of Berkeley’s righteous lawsuit challenging just one of the university’s several mammoth expansion schemes which are proposed over the next 20 years. Planet reporters did a good job of covering the fireworks, but it would have been fun to see them close up.

This week I’m visiting the grandkids, trying to relax in the country near Santa Cruz, and I get a phone call at 7 a.m. on Wednesday: “They’re going after the oaks!” Two of our four reporters also elected to take a vacation this week. It was supposed to be a quiet week, what with Berkeley councilmembers busily adding to their carbon footprint over the summer and the new semester on campus barely underway. Then, whammo, the sadly predictable university administration makes another dumb move.

I happened to talk to a former mayor yesterday, and commenting on the university’s latest erection, she said “That’s no way to build trust”—the understatement of the week. I’ll leave it to your imagination which former mayor it was.

What the university built instead, in case you’ve missed the news flash on the Planet’s website, is a big fence around the oak grove which is slated for destruction to build a gym/office complex for a sub-set of UC’s competive athletes and the bureaucrats who support them, chock-a-block with the football stadium. Why they built the fence depends on who you ask.

On the one hand, the exemplary UC press release (I sometimes think the only cool heads on campus are in the press office) said: “As the football season begins with a home game on Saturday, Sept. 1, police and campus leadership want to ensure the safety of everyone—fans and protesters—coming and going around the area.” But the message doesn’t seem to have gotten to all of the troops, since UC police cut off and arrested, with on-camera bashing, some supporters who were trying to get basic necessities to the tree-sitters. “As long as the people in the trees are getting food, water and whatever contraband, they’re not going to get down,” assistant UC police chief Mitch Celaya told a Chronicle reporter. The whole ugly scene, complete with nasty skinhead cops with gas masks clubbing unarmed victims, has been captured on Youtube by LA Wood on the bcitizen website at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKCY4MJuJeY> .

Isn’t withholding food and water a violation of one of the Geneva Conventions? Not, of course, that it would matter to an institution which still employs John Yoo, the unapologetic author of the Bush adminstration’s torture policy, on its law school faculty. But as of press-time on Thursday the police seemed to have relented on this point, perhaps because a sizeable crowd which included a number of prominent persons had gathered at the grove on Wednesday to complain.

As mentioned earlier, this paper has been on the receiving end of an organized letter-writing campaign from football fans of ever-diminishing literacy whose missives can be found on these pages. One would have thought that if they really are UC Berkeley’s alums the difference between fact and sentiment would have been part of their education, but evidently not. The location of the Hayward earthquake fault, for example, whether it’s under or simply next to the construction site, will be determined from scientific evidence if and when a proper environmental impact report (EIR) is completed. However the legal dispute in the four outstanding lawsuits is over whether a decent EIR has actually been done, and in particular whether the danger to those who will be on site when the Big One happens has been accurately analysed. The location of the fault itself is only a part of the calculus.

Up until this point I’ve tried to be polite, but now it’s time to come out of the closet. I am one of the quite sizeable majority of graduates of elite universities who actively dislike all forms of professional football, including the so-called amateur teams fielded mostly by second-rate “athletic powerhouses.” People like me tend to regard the whole megilla as breeding ground for the Michael Vicks of the future. We are not thrilled that our alma mater has jumped on this bandwagon with big bucks.

One pro-football letter-writer argued that “Frankly, the idea of the nation’s premier liberal university featuring a dominant football team would make Cal utterly unique in the college landscape.” My point, exactly.

The writer does not seem to wonder why all the other top-ranked universities aren’t trying to compete with Cal on the football field, but there could be reasons, good reasons. Harvard, Caltech, Oxford—none of them are trying to become football champs. Why?

(By the way, “unique” doesn’t take qualifiers. Cal Berkeley is unique, period, in this regard.)

The United States is in danger of becoming a spectator society inhabited by people who can no longer play their own games or even make their own music. The millions and millions of dollars which are proposed for the Strawberry Canyon entertainment extravaganza should instead be spent making sure that all of us, especially our kids, have access to healthy exercise of all kinds, including team sports for those who enjoy them, but also hiking, dancing, swimming, ice skating and other individual pursuits which can be enjoyed into old age.

We’ve run many letters pointing out that it’s harder and harder for kids to find places to play. Baseball fields are scarce and getting scarcer. The mayor and City Council allies are colluding with developers to demolish Iceland. Hourly rates for the new soccer fields (supported by public funds) are prohibitive. Even the drill team which provided hours of wholesome fun for the kids in San Pablo Park seems to be having fee problems. And this is in Berkeley—what’s happening in Oakland, Richmond, Vallejo?

Thanks to the excellent education provided for me by the state of California in better days, the letters from some of the fans remind me of the Roman poet Juvenal’s often-quoted line about panem et circenses—bread and circuses. He lived in the late first and early second century A.D., at a time when the once mighty Roman empire was in decline.

Roughly paraphased in modern language, his poem laments that in the old days no one could buy the people’s votes, but now they’ve given up their duties. They used to control everything, he says, the military, political office, everything, but now they only worry about two things, bread and circuses, commodities provided by the Roman government to keep down the grumbling.

Sounds a lot like the Unites States today, another once-proud empire in decline, doesn’t it? For bread, read cheap energy, as promised by British Petroleum to justify its recent purchase at garage-sale rates of a major portion of what used to be the people’s university. But not to worry, the people, most of them, won’t be complaining. The university, funded by the major industrialists who now provide its entertainment budget, is going to build them an even fancier arena for the on-going circus that is top-tier college football these days. And meanwhile, Richard Cheney and his lackeys, including the putative president, are running the country, and the people are letting them do it as long as the bread and circuses keep on coming.

For many months, there was a bottle of champagne in our office refrigerator, being saved for the day Karl Rove was indicted. The donor wasn’t a member of the reporting staff, since they are expected to preserve the appearance of political neutrality, but I’m pretty sure that if and when Rove had actually been indicted everyone, including the reporters, would have accepted a celebratory glass with enthusiasm. It didn’t happen—Rove was allowed to slither off the scene without going to jail, an over-enthusiastic former sales manager popped the champagne cork for some petty triumph, and the focus shifted to Alberto Gonzales as villain-du-jour. (Meanwhile, the odious Rummy had also left the building.)

The permanent villains, of course, are still Bush and Cheney. It seems that most thinking people have decided that George W. plays Charlie McCarthy to Cheney’s Edgar Bergen. For you youngsters, Bergen was a famous ventriloquist, and Charlie was his dummy. The true fan may remember that McCarthy had a good line of facetious chatter, but there was another dummy, Mortimer Snerd, who was the real card-carrying dummy in the act. He never said anything that wasn’t very very stupid. On the current Washington stage, Alberto Gonzales seems to have gotten the Mortimer Snerd role.

Not only has he lied repeatedly, he’s lied about lying, again and again, and he seems to have thought he could get away with it. He’s contradicted himself, on camera, about things he originally said also on camera. As my grandkids would say, how dumb is that?

He’s become a figure of fun for his pathetic attempts to cover his tracks, but the bad deeds he facilitated were not at all funny. He turned the respected position of U.S. attorney into a political patronage job. He cooked up a warrant-less electronic surveillance program after the Sept. 11 attacks, and tried to sucker his ailing boss into going along with it. And much more.

He’s been a prime target for the impeachment frenzy now sweeping some segments of the left. There are many who seem to believe that if we can just burn enough of the bad Bushies at the stake, figuratively speaking, the nation will be delivered from evil. Would that it were so simple.

From time to time in my youth I read things about an amorphous philosophical tradition which united a lot of varied theories under a banner labeled Personalism. I have no idea where the discussion had gone since then, but the invaluable Wikipedia, rightly or wrongly, today lists three main pillars of the definition of big-P Personalism: “1. Only people are real (in the ontological sense), 2. Only people have value, and 3. Only people have free will.”

That’s way too confusing to discuss in this space, but it does suggest to me that many observers and would-be actors on the political scene suffer from a kind of creeping lower-case personalism. That is to say, they seem to think that if we can just get rid of all the bad actors the stage will be clear for progress to continue its forward march.

This is similar to the Great Man view of history, and also to the popular interpretation of Dick the Butcher’s remark in Henry VI, part 2: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” This quote is generally used in an anti-lawyer context, but it more properly should be interpreted as showing that villains want to get lawyers out of the way so they can carry out their nefarious plans.

Gonzales in particular, though a lawyer himself, was clearly trying, at the behest of his principals (whoever they were) to get rid of the honest U.S. attorneys so he could do what he wanted. It didn’t work.

But it’s also a dangerous mistake for the good guys to think that getting rid of the individuals who seem, as of now, to be personally responsible for what’s going on will solve many of the country’s problems. If we could have impeached, in one fell swoop, Rove, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Cheney and Bush, we’d still have a mess in Iraq which would not easily be cleaned up.

All of the above, plus many Democrats, now seem to be gravitating to the position that getting rid of the current premier of Iraq will fix things there, and that’s not true either. And remember when we thought Ashcroft was the villain? He’s actually come up a notch in public esteem since we heard how he defied Gonzales from his sickbed. (Whatever happened to Colin Powell, by the way?)

On the public stage, the actors come and go, but the problems remain. Even on a local level, it seems than some can’t be persuaded out of the little-p personalist analysis that improper choices by officials exercising free will have gotten us where we are today. Our local villains are distinctly minor league, not in a class with the truly wicked Gonzales, Cheney et al, and they’re even less potent, of course. But that hasn’t stopped calls for the replacement of the city attorney along with most of her staff, nor chilled the triumphal cheers that greeted the resignation of one high-level planning official.

Many of the same people sincerely believed that the last mayor was a scoundrel of the deepest dye, and are now shocked to conclude that her replacement is even worse, though their political philosophies appeared to differ at election time. Others held the reverse views of the two mayors, but it hasn’t made much difference either way. Ugly development continues apace, lining the same pockets as it goes on its merry way.

The current president of the University of California is departing under a cloud, but it’s foolish to expect much to change there either. The institution will continue to swallow up the cities it inhabits, student fees will continue to rise, executive compensation (that’s pay for administrators in plain English) will continue to be exorbitant.

Are there systemic solutions for all these problems? Earlier primaries? Shorter campaigns? Abolish the Electoral College? Get rid of district elections? Elect the Regents? Preferential voting? Public financing of campaigns? Spending limits? Many novel ideas are proposed, but few are proven to work.

There are two words that should be kept in mind when suggested quick fixes to political systems are being evaluated: Ed Jew, the poster child for the law of unintended consequences. Two probably adequate politicos were passed up in favor of a fresh face under a new preferential voting scheme, and look how much trouble it’s caused.

My favorite French proverb is “Plus ca change, plus la meme chose”—the more things change, the more they remain the same. Changing faces doesn’t seem to do much, but changing the rules can’t be relied on to do the right thing either.

Nevertheless, it’s satisfying to see Gonzales on his way out the door in disgrace. We can only hope his replacement isn’t worse.

Public Comment

Despite receiving numerous letters on the subject, Becky O’Malley and the Daily Planet continue to misrepresent the facts about UC’s proposed Student Athlete High Performance Center. It is clear now that the Planet is incapable of presenting the issues fairly. I am not calling Ms. O’Malley a “nimby or worse,” a “crypto Stanford fan,” or an “opponent of physical fitness”; I am calling her an irresponsible editor.

For the Daily Planet readers that are interested, here are the facts yet again. Extensive testing has shown that the SAHPC will not be built on a fault and can be built safely (in fact, experts say, it can be built more safely than most buildings in downtown Berkeley). The USGS, the country’s leading seismic authority, has reviewed and certified those findings. UC has offered to reduce the number of parking spaces from the original plan so that there will be no increase in the number of parking spaces in the area. The project does not increase the number of people in the area, it builds a new, seismically safe building for the 13 teams and 400 athletes (only a quarter of which are football players) that currently train in Memorial Stadium.

Ms. O’Malley caps off her tirade against the project by misstating the student population at Cal by 20 percent (the student population is about 35,000, not 40,000). But what is 5,000 students when you’re trying to make a point about how big and unsavory the university has become?

David Schlessinger

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GROSSLY IRRESPONSIBLE

Editors, Daily Planet:

The Berkeley City Council has my full support for the lawsuit against the University Regents over the university administration’s grossly irresponsible plan to build a student athletic center and parking garage adjacent to the Hayward Fault, to raze a beautiful carbon-sequestering grove of mature coast live oak trees, and to assault neighboring residents with the effects of heavy construction in an area utterly unsuited to large buildings that should be preserved and protected from any further construction.

The arrogant disregard for common sense represented by the current university administration, Chancellor Birgeneau, and the Regents is appalling. They are threatening this beautiful Strawberry Canyon watershed and its neighboring residents on three fronts with the plan to build a four-story student athletic center in an utterly unsuitable area, the plan to demolish the Bevatron, and the plan to work with British Petroleum to build more buildings in Strawberry Canyon to support dangerous research on genetically-modified plants to facilitate continued use of polluting internal combustion engines. There are much safer and more appropriate sites on campus if an athletic center is needed. The Bevatron should be preserved in place as a historic building rather than being demolished, with all the negative environmental consequences that entails. And the plan to join forces with a private oil company to further its commercial interests should be reconsidered and terminated.

The great University of California was founded in Berkeley to provide an academic education to California students. These projects represent a tragic betrayal of that clear and praiseworthy goal.

Charlene M. Woodcock

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WHAT CHOICE DID THEY HAVE?

Editors, Daily Planet:

While it is regrettable that by erecting a fence more attention has been focused on the tree sitters at Memorial Stadium, what choice did the university have? On Saturday 75,000 people will come to the stadium, and among that number there is the possibility that one or two passionate fans will take issue with the presence of the tree sitters and the subsequent suit that prevents the university’s efforts to build a safe and clean athletic center and retrofit the stadium. The university cannot control the behavior of people on either side of the issue who might behave badly, but certainly it would be held responsible if an ugly incident were to occur. It certainly does have a responsibility to do what it can to protect everyone involved, and a fence that allows the tree sitters to sit if they wish to continue to do so, seems pretty benign. Berkelyans For Cal, an independent citizen group, believes that the university has acted responsibly and pro-actively.

Sandy Bails

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NO DOLLARS, NO SENSE

Editors, Daily Planet:

How can the City of Berkeley put out an annual report, as City Manager Phil Kamlarz has just done, without anything about the city’s finances and budget?! How are we spending the money? I consider myself as progressive as the next Berkeley resident, but I am interested in how the money is being spent. As some wise person has noted, the allocation of resources is the most important ethical question of our time. By contrast, the report for the City of Sacramento has, at least in years past, has shown how the budget for the past fiscal year was spent, and how it is allocated for the current (or next) fiscal year. Sacramento presents not only the dollar amounts, but a pie chart to give the reader a visual of allocations and their changes over time. How refreshing! It would also be useful to know how much we are falling behind in infrastructure investment. Is the city budgeting for replacement and/or maintenance of facilities at a fiscally prudent level? Maybe next year, the annual report from Berkeley can be more informative and revealing.

Robert Blomberg

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STRAIGHT TALK

Editors, Daily Planet:

For those interested in some straight-up unadulterated information about the Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC), half of one of the seven projects included in the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP), and are sick of arguments by innuendo and slander and sweeping generalizations, consider the following all of which is verifiable at the university’s website:

www.cp.berkeley.edu/SCIP/DEIR/SCIP_DEIR.html.

• That in fact the SAHPC would not only accommodate football players but also teams which neither practice nor hold games near the stadium. These include men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s crew, men’s and women’s gymnastics, and men’s and women’s soccer, none of which are tied by proximity to the stadium location.

• That the SAHPC would not only be a training facility but also an office complex that would accommodate an “additional 368 employee headcount” and who might reasonably be located somewhere besides the western façade of Memorial Stadium.

• That the SAHPC would degrade the western façade of the historic stadium, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and that the university considers this impact “significant and unavoidable” (emphasis added). To be precise, according to the environmental impact report, “…the SAHPC, would cause a significant adverse change in the historical significance of the CMS.”

• That the threatened oak grove west of the stadium is a contributing feature to the stadium’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places. As explained in the university’s own Historic Landscape Report, by Page & Turnbull, “The plan for the landscape, likely the work of John Galen Howard and MacRorie & McLaren, was an innovative solution to a very complex and challenge site. The construction…caused immense damage to Strawberry Canyon, necessitating a landscape plan that would quickly mask the scars and retain some of the natural beauty.”

Expanded from a design that could be accommodated within the stadium footprint to a building that is as large as the Recreational Sports Facility, the proposed SAHPC is bloated and excessive. There are alternatives that would have been protective of our student athletes and office workers, yet were ignored.

I cannot recall seeing a news piece that presented the campus administration, and also the UCPD, in such a disingenuous light as the one done by Fox News tonight regarding today’s disruption on campus of the tree-sitting at Memorial Stadium.

The UCPD came across with the same absence of integrity that cops in Selma, Alabama portrayed back in 1963. And the ridiculous pretense of public safety that was given as a reason for erecting a permanent chain link fence around the trees is the kind of logic, mentality, and philosophy that reminds one of the sensitivity displayed by Ronald Reagan when he bombed the campus way back when. Who the hell is in charge? Who could possibly be cooking up this ridiculous stuff?

When this whole charade began, I counted among those who supported the erection of a new athletic facility as presented by the Cal administration, but whatever faith I put in the ability of this administration to make intelligent decisions on this subject has evaporated.

I am outraged and angered at this boorish nonsense, and I expect there will be many others in the community who will be as well. The buck stops with the Chancellor on this one, and so far, he has beefed it badly. Already, the sports commentators are joking that Cal may have another potential national championship team: fencing. God, I hope the judge wasn’t watching or we’ll never get this damned thing built.

Michael Minasian

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SEN. CRAIG’S STANCE

Editors, Daily Planet:

It’s becoming increasingly clear that are about as many gay Republicans as there are gay Democrats in Congress; it’s just that when the Republicans come out, they’re wearing handcuffs.

Dave Blake

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PACIFIC STEEL EMISSIONS

Editors, Daily Planet:

I want to thank the community monitoring team for finally bringing the Pacific Steel Casting toxic trail into the light of relevant and verifiable data. The press conference on Tuesday was totally professional and good spirited. Personally, I look forward to the additional 100-plus tests now underway and to the quick death of a factory and PR machine that is killing our children, seniors and green landscape in Berkeley and beyond. I continue to be extremely disappointed with Councilmember Linda Maio’s performance. Her record on Pacific Steel Casting is pathetic and dangerous. She hasn’t cleaned up the air and she’s allowed the factory to stall and play games. Where was “Green Berkeley Mayor Tom Thumb” on Tuesday? Nowhere to be found!

Be warned, kind citizens, of Pacific Steel’s PR hack Elisabeth Jewel. She is quoted in the Chronicle this way: “It’s very difficult to point the finger solely at Pacific Steel.” Bullshit.

Let’s give her the finger right back! Join us as we slam the coffin down on PSC President and CEO Robert Delsol’s death-for-profit machine. May God have mercy on your soul, Delsol.

Willi Paul

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CORRECTIONS

Editors, Daily Planet:

In my Aug. 28 commentary, “West Berkeley’s Air Quality: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I misstated that “UCB’s School of Public Health had calculates that in recent years, PSC’s toxic air emissions have risen 160 percent.” According to the California Air Resources Board data, the emissions for of some PSC airborne pollutants (benzene, copper, cresols, phenol, and zinc) have increased by over 160 percent. PSC’s manganese and Nickel emissions increased 51.6 percent during this period, formaldehyde increased 127.2 percent, lead increased by 128.5 percent, total particulates by 13.7 percent and pm 2.5 by 11 percent.

L A Wood

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ALAMEDA JOURNALISM

Editors, Daily Planet:

Comments in Becky O’Malley’s Aug. 21 editorial “Welcome To The East Bay’s Many Wonders” rings true for many of us here in Alameda. We are witness to the departure of the editor of the Alameda Journal (a MediaNews publication), a certain Mr. Jeff Mitchell, who is pleased to “get back out on the ‘proverbial’ street again” as he wrote, in a beat reporter position with the Oakland Tribune, also a MediaNews publication. It’s odd that Mr. Mitchell notes that he is looking forward to “conducting some investigations” in this new role—he did so haphazardly, and only at his convenience, during his past 16 months with the Journal. I guess with the recent union turmoil at the Tribune and within MediaNews in general, he’s happy to still have any job to put the best face to.

Pursuant to our disappointment with our local media authorities here in Alameda, I’ve been “conducting some investigations” of my own. One thing I uncovered is a 25-year-old quote that could have been written yesterday. In Anger, the Misunderstood Emotion (1982), Carol Tavris writes ,on social injustice and anger, the following: “True investigative reporting, such as uncovering governmental corruption, is one of the essential aspects of the media’s job. But by attacking the media for their alleged bias, the government has successfully cowed the very institutions that ought to be monitoring it—with the acquiescence of the public, who want to be polite, and who do not want to be angry with their leaders.” and “But it is not too much to hope for an electorate that can tell the difference between hatemongering attacks and legitimate accusations, a public that does not confuse brutality with ‘openness’ or passivity with ‘politeness.’ Were the public to avoid all anger on the grounds of manners, that would be a calamity. Were the public to favor an unrestrained howl of rage on the grounds of honesty, that would be a catastrophe.”

Let’s hope that Mr. Mitchell re-discovers the meaning of investigative reporting on the streets of Oakland.

David Howard

Alameda

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WATERSIDE WORKSHOP

Editors, Daily Planet:

I was glad to read your extensive Aug. 7 article about the Waterside Workshop (“A Fresh Start for Berkeley’s Aquatic Park”). But there was one program that was left out that is a valuable resource for the community.

The Waterside Workshop also has a budding sewing program. They offer two workshops—Sewing Lab for children (Tuesday. 3-6 p.m.) and Sewing Lab with Tea for adults and children (Sunday, 5-9 p.m.). These two workshops are supervised by Ingrid Good.

It was my good luck to find the Waterside’s sewing program. I got involved because I wanted to update some of my clothes. Ingrid is an excellent instructor able to problem solve any thing I and others have presented to her. The lab provides various kinds of sewing machines, basic supplies and even some donated fabric. All this for $3 an hour. My understanding is that they are planning special classes for the future.

If you are interested in updating your skills or just want to use a specific type of machine I recommend that you come by the Waterside Workshop.

J.E.M. Reich

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FANDANGO

Editors, Daily Planet:

What is the meaning of the “Fandango” sign on the University Ave. pedestrian overpass? Any comments?

Valerie Artese

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VAN HOOL BUSES

Editors, Daily Planet:

I really appreciated Glen Kohler’s Aug. 24 commentary “Empty Van Hool Buses on Telegraph.” It’s about time AC Transit answered some questions about the obvious over-capacity of the huge buses charging up and down Telegraph Avenue through Berkeley. Undoubtedly, part of the problem is that these buses stop at fewer stops, so fewer people find them convenient to use. And they are also very uncomfortable to ride in, as J. Douglas Allen-Taylor pointed out in his wonderful Aug. 21 “amusement park ride” parody of these unwieldy monsters.

I have to mention, however, that Mr. Kohler’s tallies of the numbers of passengers on the Van Hools are a bit higher than mine have been. I sometimes see buses with no passengers at all on them. I even saw two such “zeroes” in a row last week. And I regularly see buses carrying three to five riders. It is clearly bad for the environment to have these large buses spewing diesel exhaust throughout the city for such meager passenger loads.

But enough negativity. Let’s look at the silver lining. It occurs to me that “Van Hool Passenger Counting” could become a new Berkeley hobby, sort of like trainspotting in Britain. Find out how many times you can break into double figures—that’s an accomplishment itself. For a real challenge, try to count the most “zero passenger” loads in a row. It’s fun and exciting, and the whole family can participate! Thanks, AC Transit!

Doug Buckwald

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BAY BRIDGE BOONDOGGLE

Editors, Daily Planet:

Over the Labor Day weekend Bay Area traffic is having its nose rubbed into what is at least one of the costliest boondoggles in history, and an ugly white elephant at that—the new Bay Bridge east span.

According to a long-time CalTrans engineer I know, the public has been fooled into thinking that the existing Bay Bridge east span had to be replaced because on section dropped after a major quake. He said that the bridge had been designed to allow single sections to break clear to protect the entire structure from major damage. It functioned as planned and should have been back in operation within weeks.

Given sufficient time or a big enough quake the new east span will face the same end as the bridge that recently collapsed over the Mississippi—especially as it is made up mostly of concrete, which hides damage being done by time and corrosive saltwater. It is interesting to note that the concrete bridge that collapsed was only about 40 years old, whereas the steel Golden Gate and Bay bridges are close to twice that old, with no major problems.

Finally, for the same amount of money, or less, we should have been able to get a sensible southern crossing connecting to 280, reducing traffic through San Francisco and providing a backup bridge.

S. Rennacker

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COMMUNITY

Editors, Daily Planet:

My car stalled in the middle of the street today near Berkeley Bowl, blocking in a car parked on the side just as its driver was arriving. This was at afternoon rush-hour, with bumper to bumper traffic along Shattuck.

I was quite frazzled but did manage to push my car far enough for that other car to leave, easily. Its driver had no further concern with me... except: Instead, the person in that other car noticed my situation and helped push me to a safe pull-over, turning an otherwise stressful event into a reminder of the pleasure of living in community. Thank you to that person. (My aged car did restart, happily, after it cooled down a bit. Sigh. It’s never done that before.)

Thomas Lord

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BUS RAPID TRANSIT

Editors, Daily Planet:

The BRT scheme is sick. Buses, according to the MTC master plan, are supposed to be feeders to BART, not competitors. Yes, BART is inadequate, so the express buses are filled, but during rush hour only. If AC Transit really wants more riders, they should start running all buses at no more than 15 to 20 minute intervals outside of peak hours. Waiting an hour for a bus implies a luxurious amount of spare time and no pressing appointments. It would cost no more to double/triple the current schedules than to put in BRT, and would definitely increase ridership. Oops, I forgot. That would mean serving the community rather than having bragging rights at a convention of professional urban planners. That writer who suggested free rides was also right on. Even if the free rides are only during off-peak hours, they would spread the load around and make the bus a truly desirable option, if the bus ran often enough to even be an option.

Teddy Knight

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A FEW STATEMENTS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Which of these statements is true?

President Bush’s actions and policies in Iraq played a part in creating the disaster we now find ourselves in.

Bush and the Republican-led Congress waged a pre-emptive war on a country that had not attacked us (and posed little threat), thus creating a breeding ground for terrorists where none had previously existed.

Expanding terrorism can be traced to specific causes. In the last five and a half years United States has invaded and occupied two Muslim countries.

Unilateral military efforts will not put an end to Islamic extremism; they only make the problem worse.

Instead of a military surge in Iraq, we should be addressing the root causes of extremism. Delivering vital services and promoting human rights will do more good than bombs and bullets.

Bush and his Republican supporters saying that “we’re fighting them there so we don’t have to here” is utter nonsense.

The Bush White House has continued to used fear of terrorism since 9/11 to justify its war in Iraq.

The question of Kitchen Democracy (KD) has emerged in an important way in Berkeley over the last few months; and we need to understand its potential impact on what we are trying to do. Kitchen Democracy is a website that purports to constitute a connection between citizens and city hall.

When Robert Vogel presented KD to the City Council in June, 2006, he presented it as a center for the dissemination of information, and a way in which citizens of Berkeley could exchange opinions on local issues, and present them to government. Marie Bowman of BANA, and Karl Reeh of LeConte Neighborhood Association both sponsored City Council funding KD as a site for information and idea exchange. But today, KD presents itself as a place to “vote” on issues. In fact, the idea of voting has become primary over the expression of opinion: KD informs its readers that they can “vote and optionally post a comment.” And KD considers that its tallies represent decisions made on issues. Councilmember Wozniak, who funded KD, presented KD as a place to “vote” on the rezoning of Wright’s Garage in Elmwood last Spring. Why is this important?

A “vote” is a formal decision making procedure under established democratic rules. It is defined by a constituency which is composed of those people that the formal procedure of voting recognizes as legitimate voters. And it provides that constituency the means of making decisions for itself on issues that concern it. That decision-making process can take the form of a referendum, a vote on a proposition, or an election of a person to a governing body. In all cases, a vote is a formal procedure, under certain pre-established rules, for a defined constituency, toward the making of political decisions.

A vote is to be differentiated from a petition. A petition is a voluntary expression of opinion by a list of signatories, directed to a policy-making body concerning their feelings and desires with respect to an issue. It addresses itself to those who have the power to vote on the issue. Because it is self-generated and self-constituting as a voluntary collective expression, it does not have the political weight of a decision-making process. Its aim is to collectively influence a decision-making process. It is not formal according to any rules of decision-making, but is ad hoc as an expression of proffered popular feeling.

There are many other forms of political expression along with petitions. Letters to the editor, for instance, or letters to City Council or a zoning board, or statements posted on a bulletin board. All these are individual or collective expressions of opinion that do not have decision-making power.

Since KD is a website to which people go voluntarily and in an ad hoc fashion, to register their opinions, it functions as a bulletin board. It is not a mechanism set up by a constituency through which that constituency can make a decision. It is purely voluntaristic. It does not facilitate any formal decision-making process for an established constituency, nor does it establish a constituency for itself. As a bulletin board enterprise, it belongs to the category of petition, and not of vote.

KD is thus in bad faith when it presents the service it provides for people to voluntarily express an opinion as “voting.” It is doubly in bad faith when it presents a tally of opinions for and against a certain statement of an issue as a legitimate vote on the issue. It is triply in bad faith in presenting its own statement of an issue as representing the way a constituency to which it does not belong would state the issue. In sum, it is politically misleading people. And similarly, any person, whether city councilmember or private citizen, who interprets or evaluates the service that KD provides as “voting” is misleading people, and in bad faith.

What is important (and inexcusable) about this element of political sleight of hand (pretending a bulletin board is a vote) is that both City Council and the zoning board have accepted the tallies proclaimed by KD as real votes on issues. They are thus, without the people’s agreement, giving KD the character of a referendum, with all the political weight that a referendum has. This is a large betrayal of trust on the part of City Council and the zoning board. Indeed, it constitutes an injustice on the part of City Council and the zoning board toward the citizens of Berkeley.

I am so thankful to Dan Marks of the Berkeley Planning Department for pointing out how the planners know better than the citizens what is best for everyone. It is so relaxing just to be able to leave all the decisions to the professionals. Why should we criticize them for favoring big developers when only two or three of their 100 or so taxpayer-funded staff spends time on Big Projects? Of course the rest of them are busy handing out forms like the ones I filled out when I moved my law office from one office suite to another, asking how much food I would sell on the new premises and whether I planned to sell alcoholic beverages. One always has to watch for lawyers selling alcoholic beverages to minors in law offices close to the impressionable University of California students. I had, of course, thought that the admissions standards were too strict for the university to be accepting the kind of person who would walk into a law office looking to order a gin and tonic (and as yet, none have), but our city bureaucrats know better than we do about such things, and the best thing is to let them do their jobs (while envying them their health insurance.)

One of those Big Projects is right down the street from my office in downtown Berkeley. I must preface this by saying that I spent part of my childhood in Philadelphia, which has thoroughfares named, “Spring Garden Street” “Hunting Park Drive.” One would think, reading the names of these streets, that they are pleasant greenery-filled paths through an east coast Eden, an earthly paradise fittingly placed in the City of Brotherly Love. Sorry, they’re not. They look like post-industrial visions of rust-belt hell. So, when the name “Library Gardens” is applied to a Big Project in our own downtown, we shouldn’t have high hopes. It is next to the Berkeley Public Library, accounting for half of its name. If there are any gardens, though, in the premises they certainly aren’t visible from the street. The architecture looks like a cross between a Soviet-era workers housing complex in Irkutsk, and a monolithic miniature of San Quentin Prison. The charm of this project is enhanced by its Pepto-Bismol pink paint job appropriate for addressing the nausea that it induces. The Hinks parking lot it replaced was more architecturally pleasing. But who am I to complain—after all the best minds of our planning staff worked on and approved it.

The point, according to Marks, is that we want to put a lot of people in the center of town. This leaves a smaller footprint and encourages people to take advantage of public transit. Apparently there is an academic course that is taught in some esteemed university for planners that holds that the way to get people out of their cars and into public transit is to make their lives so aggravating, to so ramp up the annoyance factor of getting from one place to another, that everyone will all give in and ride the bus. Take away parking lots. Increase parking fees. Decrease lanes to drive in. Set up barricades so that drivers can’t get from one place to another very easily. The other view, which is to provide more and better public transit, somehow doesn’t cut it with are esteemed public agencies. BART decreases the number of cars per train so that no matter what time of day you ride, you have to stand up. BART parking lots charge a parking fee. BART makes it harder to transfer from one line to another by matching fewer of the trains. AC transit decreases buses and routes. Forget the Muni. It is historically one of the worst systems in the known world.

An example of inadequate public transit: I worked for 15 years in northern Marin County, commuting from the East Bay. That ended eight years ago. But during that time—and until today—there never has been any direct public transit between Berkeley or Oakland and Marin County. The only reliable way to get there by public transit was to take a bus to BART, take BART to San Francisco, walk to a pick-up spot for Golden Gate Transit, then take GGT from San Francisco to northern Marin. The whole trip is about two hours, using three public transit entities. Because of the lack of direct transit, I used my car daily. I heard lectures, read newspaper articles, had my employer decrease parking spaces, all to get me and my co-employees to take public transit. But you know what? Without public transit, I couldn’t. Twenty-three years later, if I still worked there, I still couldn’t. That’s nearly a quarter century without progress.

Or you can take BART to the city. I often do, seeing as how it is impossible now to get a second loan on the house to pay for a parking space, given the present financial markets. But forget it if you want to stay there after midnight, which some people do. BART stops running. One would think if you wanted to get people out of their cars, you would provide public transit instead of increasing annoyances to people who have no other way to get around. But our public servants know best.

Since I moved my office to downtown, the city planners, whose wisdom is enshrined in the design of Library Gardens, have removed two parking lots. The Hinks lot is gone. Now the one on Oxford where the Brower Center will be is gone. And, if you walk down Shattuck Avenue, there are standing memorials to what used to be businesses. Eddie Bauer—an empty building. Gateway Computer—empty. Barnes & Noble—empty. Cambridge Sound Works—empty. There are three empty store fronts just on the block between Bancroft and Durant, bounded by the new Longs and the old Cambridge Sound Works. Outside my office, on the street running between Berkeley High School and the university passing by Library Gardens, are sidewalks covered with human urine, broken glass, empty liquor bottles and cans, human shit, cigarette butts and the occasional used condom or hypodermic needle. If one were of the conspiratorial mindset, one might think that the city was purposefully set on destroying downtown so that yuppie condos and university offices could replace local business. But to believe that, one would have to believe that our government would engage in secret negotiations with the university and come to agreements that they would then conceal from the public.

According to Marks, we are paying a department of planners for this. If there are 100 of them—as Marks’ commentary seems to say—and they are making an average of $50,000 per year, plus another $10,000, conservatively, of benefits, we are paying over $6 million per year for these results. Think how what a good start that money would be to improving public transit.

I recently rode a double (accordion) Van Hool bus at the Union City BART station. It was totally filled with middle schoolers, who are about half to two-thirds adult size. The bus was perfect for them. They perched on the oddly placed seats like bird in a tree, and had confab groups with their friends all crowded on adjacent seats, since conversation and even physical contact (high fives) were possible across the narrow aisles.

I have heard that people in Europe are, overall, physically smaller than in the United States, and now, seeing how good those buses are for smaller people, I believe it. Maybe AC Transit and Van Hool should start sponsoring weight reduction and agility classes for senior bus riders so we can fit the buses.

(There is a precedent, the bed of Procrustes, in Greek mythology).

Teddy Knight

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CITY SHOULD SETTLE ITS LAWSUIT AGAINST UC BERKELEY

Editors, Daily Planet:

I cannot begin to express my disappointment in the position the Berkeley City Council has taken with regards to the construction of the Student Athlete High Performance Center and Memorial Stadium retrofit.

It is unrealistic to expect the university to build the stadium in another location or require it to utilize local NFL venues. So, the only logical solution is to retrofit Memorial. Furthermore, as the geological testing has proved beyond a reasonable doubt, the site for the proposed training facility fulfills the requirements of the Alquist-Priolo Act. Why are you letting the City of Berkeley waste its money in what amounts to a frivolous lawsuit? This position is especially troubling in light of the fact that the center will enhance the safety of the student-athletes and Cal employees who currently toil in the bowels of a seismically vulnerable Memorial stadium.

I submit to you that Cal can retain its image as a bastion of free speech and a beacon of liberal education and still field a championship-caliber football team. The two are not mutually exclusive. Frankly, the idea of the nation’s premier liberal university featuring a dominant football team would make Cal utterly unique in the college landscape. Such a combination would cause great consternation amongst the college football cognoscenti and befuddle those institutions that disdain big-time athletics. That is the kind of iconoclastic thinking that befits the unique institution that is the University of California.

I urge the council to reconsider its position and work with the University of California, the institution that is not only the lifeblood of the City of Berkeley, but the very reason for its existence.

William Butler

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POLICY, NOT POLICE

Editors, Daily Planet:

“Thank goodness, things are nothing like that bad around here.” My colleagues and I have been jailed, sued, beaten, even hog-tied for building a sand castle in the UC volleyball court once in People’s Park, for standing silently with candles in a non-violent protest of homeless sweeps, and for simply carrying a sign which stated “No Park No Peace.”

This community can’t afford to forget that we are jailing people every day for having no place to live, for not being able to afford to pay “quality of life” fines, and for non-violent protests of these and other ridiculous policies.

We don’t need more police; we need smarter policy makers.

Carol Denney

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VAN HOOLS ON TELEGRAPH

Editors, Daily Planet:

I have been a street vendor on Telegraph Avenue for the past 15 years. Recently my life and the lives of my co-workers have been made very difficult by AC Transit.

The new buses (Van Hool) have their tail-pipes at ground level, where as the old smaller buses had them at roof level. Each time one of these Van Hool behemoths drives past, their exhaust causes clouds of filth to be blown over our merchandise (I make and sell children’s clothes), all over the public on the sidewalk (especially little children) and into any of the stores silly enough to leave their doors open. This situation is not healthy for anyone.

I would be more tolerant of this if these buses were full or at least well used. They are not. Each day we—myself and my fellow street vendors—watch bus after double-bus drive by almost empty—many of them actually empty and a large percentage being driven very aggressively and in excess of the speed limit.

If anyone would like to witness this phenomenon for themselves, I would invite them to come to Telegraph and Channing between 5 and 6p.m.—stand on the west/exhaust side of the street for full effect. You will witness that it is not uncommon to have up to three double-buses at once on the four block section between Dwight and Bancroft, on which there are an average of less than six commuters per bus—and this is at rush hour. Could someone please explain to me how this is helping the environment—even if these buses did run on a slightly quicker schedule (at a cost of $400,000,000)—they would still need passengers to make any improvement to our environment.

I have called AC Transit’s “Customer Relations Line” (891-4700) six times over the last two months and have been promised that I would be called back numerous times—to date this has not happened. I have found the staff on the “Customer Relations Line” to be rude and unhelpful. During my last conversation with them, I mentioned that I would be contacting the media and was told by AC Transit staff to “go ahead and do that.”

In summation, I am requesting that AC Transit do the following:

1. Limit the number of buses driven up Telegraph to the number needed.

2. Consider returning to the single bus (with tail pipe in the air) on this route.

3. To slow the buses down in the very busy area of the top four blocks of Telegraph.

4. To consider filling the buses they already have before spending four hundred million dollars on a service that is not currently hardly being used.

5. To consider sending the staff of their “Customer Relations Line” on some sort of people skills class.

Philip Rowntree

•

EDITORIAL ROLLER COASTER

Editors, Daily Planet:

Reading Daily Planet editorials is like riding a roller coaster: lots of twists, and you never know where you’ll end up.

The Aug. 14 piece is classic. It starts by trying to excuse Chris Kavanagh, who has under oath claimed to be a Berkeley resident since the late 1970s, but as it turns out has resided in a “charming cottage” in Oakland since at least 2001. On this point, the Planet is wrong on some of the facts, since you assume that Kavanagh has actually signed leases in both cities and that he spends roughly equal time in each. But the facts seem to be that he has signed only one lease—in Oakland. He has no lease in Berkeley, and has instead given multiple “residence addresses” (first on Tunnel Road, next on Dwight Way, and most recently at the Elmwood Post Office). The landlords and property managers at these places deny that he has lived there. Interestingly, not even Kavanagh has publicly defended his earlier claims to a Berkeley residence. Maybe his attorney has educated him about the penalties for perjury.

Then the editorial does a 180-degree turn and hits a double bulls-eye. Your first target is developers like David Teece who have gotten mega-rich by building city-subsidized housing that is exempt control by the Rent Board. You are dead-on correct in saying that this hurts small Berkeley landlords, who get no subsidies, pay full property taxes, and are subject to the most stringent rent control regulations in the country.

Then comes your last paragraph, which compares Kavanagh to “the other cynical baby boomers who have stockpiled and sublet rent-controlled units in Berkeley and Manhattan even though they can and do live elsewhere.” Moderates in Berkeley have been taking a lot of heat for saying the same thing over the past few years: whatever the justification for rent control in the ’70’s, the program today does not protect those who most need protection. Instead it subsidizes people who were lucky enough to have moved into a unit 10 or 20 years ago, and who often hang on to their sub-market pied a terres, renting them at uncontrolled rates to newcomers. This is flatly against Rent Board regulations, but the current pro-tenant Board has done nothing to stop it.

Another Rent Board member (Eleanor Walden) has now been officially accused of a similar scam: accepting Section 8 subsidized housing at one address, while acting as a “master tenant” of a rent controlled unit in another place. Her case is up for hearing at the Rent Board in September. I wonder how the Board will deal with this obvious conflict of interest.

A lot of people think that Berkeley’s housing policies encourage this kind of petty (and major) corruption, and are unfair both to smaller landlords and homeowners. Thanks for daring to open the subject. I’d like to see more of this on your news pages as well.

Kathy Snowden

Member of BPOA

•

MISINFORMATION

Editors, Daily Planet:

Really, Becky, it’s not a service to the community to continue spreading misinformation about the student athlete center in the pages of your own newspaper.

The parking garage would not be for student athletes. It would simply replace parking that already exists, no more, no less, for employees coming to work, for people visiting the optometry clinic the law school, the business school. Students don’t drive to the stadium area, they walk or ride bikes for heaven sakes. There would be no net increase in traffic. In fact, the stadium retrofit calls for 10,000 fewer seats, thus ten thousand fewer people on football days.

On those six to eight football days a year, the garage would provide around 500 places for people to park, places that already exist in the stadium area...but would be removed in a redesign of the landscaping. That redesign will create a park-like setting around the north end of the stadium with many more and healthier trees than exist today. It doesn’t help anyone in this discussion to continue spreading exaggerations and misinformation. Let’s play fair and hope that the ultimate result is a better relationship between the university and the city that share this little bit of earth called Berkeley.

Linda Schacht

•

SCRAPING EVERYTHING CLEAN

Editors, Daily Planet:

Yes, the duplicitous insect has crawled off the merry-go-round of developer-friendly sock puppets. Or so some people think. The accuracy of their perception makes little difference because the Berkeley Planning and Development Department will continue to be a place where strong emotions come into public view.

Population pressure pushes up our property value. This we like. We may think about adding an in-law unit or a granny flat. In each of us is a “little developer” because humans are builders. Yet we also grieve for what we may lose, such as green space and charm. Our cities, our stock market, our diets—the drama of greed and grief takes shape in all of these. In a 100 years, Berkeley will look more like San Francisco. In 100,000 years, the glaciers will, as they have in the past, scrape everything clean.

The lyrics “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” have certainly been true in West Berkeley where foundry emissions and their noxious odors are a daily reminder of our local air quality crisis. Current levels of airborne chemicals and metal particulates have given zip code 94710 the shameful distinction of having some of the highest levels of asthma in the county.

Although West Berkeley is located at the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay, it has much poorer air quality than is found in larger California cities such as San Jose or even San Francisco. Despite numerous local advocacy groups, and even several lawsuits, this environmental outrage has only grown. The shocking truth is that today’s residents of the Oceanview district know little more about the health impacts from these industrial emissions than locals knew a quarter of a century ago.

The deepening concern over these persistent toxic emissions has residents and workers in our community pointing blame at the area’s number one polluter, Pacific Steel Casting. Other citizens identify this problem with our inept regional air authority, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and still others with the City of Berkeley’s failed zoning practices that have allowed housing and offices to be located in close proximity to the steel foundry.

Although all these entities are culpable, it is clearly the air district that bears the most responsibility. For decades, BAAQMD has fostered a regulatory climate in West Berkeley of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and in doing so, has perpetuated an ongoing health quandary.

Regulatory hot spot

Modern-day air regulation came into existence more than 50 years ago as did our regional air district, BAAQMD. From the very beginning, the air district’s mandate has been mired in politics, allowing industrial polluters to “regulate” themselves, and as in Berkeley, to avoid any real public review or accountability.

BAAQMD, like so many other regulatory agencies, has lost sight of its prime objective to protect the public’s health and instead has preferred to protect private industry from any substantial changes. Pacific Steel Casting, at Gilman and Second Street, is a prime example of the air district’s failure to regulate.

Proof of this lies in the fact that over the past five years PSC’s production levels have increased enormously as have their airborne contaminants such as manganese, zinc, nickel, copper, cresols, phenol, benzene and formaldehyde. Yet, these emissions continue to be poorly monitored and inadequately contained. UCB’s School of Public Health calculates that in recent years, PSC’s toxic air emissions have risen 160 percent.

Under growing public pressure, BAAQMD has only recently begun to acknowledge this issue surrounding PSC’s emissions. For those living and working near PSC, the air district’s response has come very late in the game. In answer to its critics, BAAQMD has now required PSC to update its 16-year-old Health Risk Assessment (HRA). One can only wonder why the district took so long to determine that a new assessment was needed for the foundry. Certainly, every regulatory definition of emissions “hot spot” should have triggered this health review years ago, especially given Pacific Steel’s expanded operations, new pollution sources, and increased emissions.

Unfortunately, an updated HRA will never provide reliable answers to the many questions regarding adequate health protection of the community. The promised risk assessment, now months overdue, is tainted by the fact that it lacks any independent or impartial review. Paid for by the polluter, PSC, this “selective” investigation will only continue to justify the foundry’s polluting activities. Rarely do HRAs accomplish any more than this.

The smoking gun

Residents and workers, who have been left gasping for some regulatory relief, may now be finding this in the form of a community grant from BAAQMD. Perhaps to get some relief of its own from the public’s growing anger, the air district agreed several months ago to fund an air study centered on the foundry’s metal particulate emissions.

The district’s grant of $25,000 was awarded to Global Community Monitoring (GCM), an international environmental justice group. Despite decades of complaints and health concerns about Pacific Steel’s emissions, the West Berkeley Community Monitoring Project provides the first systematic air sampling in Oceanview.

Since May, a small team of volunteers, in conjunction with GCM, has climbed all over residential rooftops in West Berkeley, positioning portable air samplers downwind from PSC. The project has been sampling PM 10 particulate matter (10-micron diameter) for evidence of several metals common to PSC’s emission inventory.

It certainly didn’t take a giant leap of logic to hypothesize that air sampling would reveal a hefty dispersion of metals from the foundry across the Oceanview area. Most who live in that district are all too familiar with the odor plumes that waft out more than a mile from the steel mill. The monitoring team now wants to know if the particulate metals travel like the odor plumes and at what concentrations.

This unprecedented effort by GCM is now beginning to answer some of these questions and has produced some astonishing data. Although laboratory results are still preliminary, the nearly two-dozen samples processed so far have shown that concentrations of PSC’s metal contaminants were highest at locations closest to and downwind from PSC. Lower, but still excessive, levels of these contaminants have also been measured more than a half a mile from the stacks of PSC. It should be noted that the monitoring project has dispelled the long-held belief that the Highway 80 is the source of Oceanview’s airborne metal emissions.

It is not surprising that manganese and nickel are showing up in high concentrations. According to the California Air Resource Board’s data, Pacific Steel Casting is the only significant industrial source of manganese in the Oceanview area. PSC also accounts for 99 percent of all industrial nickel emissions from the more than thirty West Berkeley industrial sources that come up on CARB’s radar. A health consultant for Berkeley’s community monitoring team, Mark Chernaik, Ph.D., has stated that the levels of manganese found in sample was 10 to 20 times higher than deemed safe by the World Health Organization. Nickel was found in a sample to be “up to 330 times the U.S. EPA reference concentration for this contaminant.”

Early indications of the GCM monitoring project suggest that BAAQMD’s assumptions about the levels of PSC’s airborne metal particulates and the dispersion of these emissions may be grossly underestimated. Perhaps the GCM project will now shift public awareness from the foundry’s noxious odors to the potential dangers produced by PSC’s metal particulate emissions that cannot be detected by sight or smell.

To find out more about the West Berkeley Community Monitoring Project, please attend a press conference being held at 11 a.m. today (Tuesday, Aug. 28) at 1340 Eighth St., which is one of the sampling locations. You will have an opportunity to view the air sampling equipment and speak with the monitoring team about the project and the lab results of the samples analyzed so far. The West Berkeley project is approximately halfway complete and is scheduled to run for several more months. Additional information can also be found at www.berkeleycitizen.org/monitoring.html or at www.gcmonitor.org.

L A Wood hosts a website on Berkeley affairs at www.berkeleycitizen.org.

In a recent editorial, Becky O’Malley described “smart growth” as “the unproven theory that making already-developed urban areas ever denser will prevent sprawl into the hinterlands.” While this is often cited as a benefit of smart growth by its advocates, it is only one aspect of smart growth, and the least important from the perspective of Berkeley.

First, I agree with Ms. O’Malley that building more apartment buildings in Berkeley will have little if any effect on sprawl outside of the East Bay. Suburban sprawl is mainly driven by demand for detached single-family homes. The people who are moving into the new apartment buildings (rental and condo) in Berkeley are overwhelmingly not families with children who would otherwise live out in Contra Costa country. It is likely true, however, that most of these new residents work or study in Berkeley, and would have lived outside Berkeley if the new housing had not been built here. Thus, their commuting (most likely driving) is now less than it would have been otherwise, which is a good thing for the environment.

This is a modest benefit, and hardly something to get too excited about. Among smart growth advocates (of which I am one) and Berkeley’s planning staff, there is too often a tone that Berkeley needs to “sacrifice” for the good of the region and the planet. I think this is the wrong emphasis. Smart growth is good mainly because it can help make Berkeley a better city—if it’s done right.

First off, we need to recognize why growth (especially more housing) is important to Berkeley’s future. Berkeley is one of the most desirable places to live in the country, especially for progressive folks who enjoy a vibrant atmosphere. Since there is little if any room to build single-family houses in Berkeley and its immediate environs, the price of existing homes has been bid up to where they are unaffordable for most people (who does buy these modest houses going for well over $500,000 anyway?). If multi-unit housing is not built in Berkeley, over time the demand will push up rents and condo prices. Vacancy rent control would only slow the process. Combined with the sky-high price of single-family homes, a policy of little or no growth would mean that Berkeley would become more of an upscale city, and lose the diversity that makes it more interesting than a town like Palo Alto.

A smart growth approach says that the best place to build new housing is along major boulevards and in the downtown.

This is marked contrast to the “dumb growth” that prevailed here in the 1960s, when numerous apartment buildings were put up within residential neighborhoods, creating an ugliness that we still live with today. The smart growth strategy likely encourages residents of new housing to use of mass transit instead of cars, though probably less than claimed by many smart growth advocates. Undoubtedly though, it creates a more vibrant street life and support local businesses.

This basic approach seems to have widespread support in Berkeley (even among critics of certain new developments). Apart from the minority that would prefer very little new housing at all (“Berkeley is too crowded and has too much traffic already”), I think it’s fair to say that the debate is not about smart growth, but rather about how best to do it. I believe that discussion would be advanced if those who are opposed to the scale and magnitude of current development trends stop attacking smart growth, and if those who support the trends stop making questionable claims about the impact of development in Berkeley on suburban sprawl.

Steve Meyers is a Berkeley resident.

Columns

This is a tale about politics, influence, money and murder. It began more than 40 years ago with a bloodletting so massive no one quite knows how many people died. Half a million? A million? Through four decades the story has left a trail of misery and terror. Last month it claimed four peasants, one of them a 27-year-old mother.

It is the history of the relationship between the United States and the Indonesian military, and unless Congress puts the brakes on the Bush administration’s plans to increase aid and training for that army, it is likely to claim innumerable victims in the future.

Speaking alongside Indonesia’s Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsone in Singapore last month, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the White House intends “to deepen the strategic partnership between Indonesia and the U.S.A.”

Given what that partnership has led to over the past four decades, it a profoundly disturbing statement.

The Washington-Jakarta narrative begins in 1965 with the Tentara Nasional Indonesia’s (TNI)—the Indonesian Army—massacre of Indonesian leftists, a bloodletting in which the United States was a partner How many died is unclear, certainly 500,000, and maybe up to a million or more. According to the U.S. National Security Archives published by George Washington University, the United States not only encouraged the annihilation of Indonesia’s left, it actually fingered individuals to the military death squads.

When Suharto, the dictator who took over after the 1965 massacres, decided to invade the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975, the Ford administration gave him a green light. Out of a population of 600,000 to 700,000, the invasion killed between 83,000 and 182,000, according to the Commission of Reception, Truth and Reconciliation

“As a permanent member of the Security Council and superpower,” the Commission found, “the United States … consented to the invasion and allowed Indonesia to use its military equipment in the knowledge that this violated U.S. law and would be used to suppress the right of self-determination.”

The United States was not alone in abetting the invasion. Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam “encouraged” the invasion, according to the Jakarta Post, and Japan, Indonesia’s leading source of aid and trade, stayed on the sidelines. France and Britain increased trade and aid in the invasion’s aftermath, and in an effort to protect Indonesia’s Catholics, the Vatican remained silent.

It was not the first time the United States and its allies had rolled for Jakarta. When the Suharto dictatorship short-circuited a 1969 United Nations plebiscite on the future of West Papua, no one raised a protest.

Through six presidents—Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush and Clinton—the TNI had carte blanche to brutally suppress autonomy movements in Aech, Papua, and East Timor, murder human rights activists, and—according to the U.S. Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the State Department—engage in violence and oppression against women, threats to civil liberties, child exploitation, religious persecution, and judicial and prison abuse.

After more than 30 years of either encouraging or turning a blind eye to the savagery of the TNI, the Clinton administration and the UN finally intervened to stop the rampage unleashed on the Timorese when they had the effrontery to vote for independence in 1999. However, before the force of mostly Australian troops could land, TNI-sponsored and led militias killed some 1500 people, destroyed 70 percent of East Timor’s infrastructure, and deported 250,000 Timorese to Indonesian West Timor.

Indonesia has refused to hand over any of the TNI officers currently charged for crimes against humanity for leading the 1999 pogrom or taking part in the brutal suppression of East Timor from 1975 to 1999. Indeed, many have been reassigned to places like West Papua, where Indonesia is attempting to crush a low-level independence insurgency.

Col Burhanuddin Siagian, indicted for crimes against humanity for his actions in East Timor, was recently appointed a sub-regional military commander in Papua.

“It is shocking that a government supposedly committed to military reform and fighting impunity would appoint an indicted officer to a sensitive senior post in Papua,” Paula Makabory, spokesperson for the Institute for Human Rights Study & Advocacy—West Papua told the Australian Broadcasting Company. A coaltion of human rights organizations is demanding that Indonesian President Susilo Yudhoyono withdraw the appointment and suspend Siagian from duty.

Several other commanders, all under indictment for human rights crimes, have also been appointed to military posts in Papua and the province of Ache.

And how does the TNI continue to get away with this?

Starting in 2001, Indonesia began a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign— abetted by the White House—to lift the ban on military aid to Indonesia. A leading force in that campaign is Paul Wolfowitz, disgraced former head of the World Bank and ambassador to Indonesia from 1986 to 1989.

The lobbying worked and sanctions were gradually relaxed. Military aid more than doubled from 2001 to 2004. In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “A reformed and effective Indonesian military is in the interest of everyone in the region,” and lifted the last restrictions on military aid.

Part of the “reforms” Rice referred to require the TNI to divest itself of its vast economic network, which, according to the International Relations Center, accounts for 70 to 75 percent of the military’s funding. The TNI runs corporations, mining operations, and cooperatives.

A 2004 law requires the TNI to divest itself of its holdings by 2009, but a loophole allows the military to keep “foundations” and “cooperatives.” According to Defense Minister Sudarsone, 1494 out of the TNI’s 1500 businesses are “foundations’ or “cooperatives.”

“The core problem for addressing impunity [of TNI commanders] is that civilian government has no control over the military while they do not control their finances,” Human Rights Watch Chair Charmin Mohamed told Radio Australia, “and on this key issue Yudhoyono has clearly failed.”

While the military continues to resist efforts to reform, there is growing anger at the TNI’s penchant for violence.

In late May, Indonesian Marines opened fire on East Java demonstrators protesting the TNI’s claim to land the protestors say was taken illegally. Four people were killed and several others wounded, including a four-year old child whose mother was among the dead.

The shootings have angered some important political figures. Djoko Suslio, who sits on the powerful Defense Committee, accused the military of using “weapons, brought with money from the state budget to kill their own brothers,” and the important Islamic Crescent Star Party denounced the killings. Abdurraham Wahid, a former president and the leader of the National Awakening Party, says his organization intends to file civil suits against the Navy. The Missing Person and Victims of Violence organization is petitioning the government to move the case from military to civilian courts.

The TNI’s track record has also angered some in the U.S. Congress. Representative Nita Lowey (D-NY) and Chris Smith (R-NJ) are currently leading a campaign to cut the Bush administration’s proposed aid package because of Jakarta’s failure to prosecute human rights violations. Arrayed against that is the Bush administration’s campaign to surround China with U.S. allies and more than 40 years of cooperation or acquiescence to the brutality of the Indonesian military.

For further information, go to the East Timor and Indonesian Action Network (ETAN.org).

If the items on the Crooks and Liars progressive blog are a bellwether of what a good portion of the nation is thinking and talking about, then for a brief period this week, at least, the nation turned its eyes on Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho.

Mr. Craig, if you missed it—and hard to see how you could, if you opened a newspaper or turned on a news channel—is the Idaho Republican who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct following his arrest in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport men’s room for conduct considered consistent with a man trying to pick up another man to have sex. According to the news accounts, and the far-too-many graphic re-enactments provided by television stations, Mr. Craig sat in one toilet stall and engaged in various actions to try to attract the attention of the man sitting in the next stall to see if he was interested. The actions ranged from running his hand under the stall divider to moving his foot under the same divider to touch the other man’s foot.

Presumably, though in Mr. Craig’s case it never got that far, these were signals for the two men to join in one of the stalls.

On Wednesday night, Crooks and Liars led off with a parody on the Republican Party as the old flaming gay Village People group, writing that “the more one looks at the evidence that Craig seems to be gay, the more one can see that it is really just evidence of being conservative....When conservatives gush about how macho Fred Thompson and President Bush are, we do sound a little bit like Village People fans.” The blog then moved to a clip from a Keith Olbermann Countdown segment that read from the police report on the Craig arrest in a parody of the old “just the facts, ma’am” Dragnet television show, followed with a news clip of President George Bush’s reaction to the Craig situation, followed, some items down, with an entry called “James Sensenbrenner BBC’s ‘Little Britain’ channel’s Republican Larry Craig’s Bath Room Bust” which includes a clip which C&L says is “hilarious! Maybe Larry Craig should have used this defense,” followed by a CNN clip in which “CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin laid out a fantastic breakdown of Senator Larry Craig’s bizarre claims surrounding his bathroom sex scandal,” followed, an item or so down, by another clip from Countdown, with the tagline “On Countdown, Keith Olbermann talked with Air America Radio talk show host, Rachel Maddow about Republican Senator Larry Craig’s presser, Mitt Romney throwing him under the bus (along with former President Bill Clinton) the laundry list of Republican sex scandals and the glaring hypocrisy oozing from the Republican Party,” followed, well, you get the picture.

Of the 24 items on C&L’s first page at 8:30 Wednesday night, nine of them concerned Mr. Craig reflecting not so much a Crooks and Liars obsession as it does a sort of national bout of junior high schoolyard snickering. Larry got caught trying to cop a feely on another boy in the bathroom. No shit? Come with me to my locker and tell me everything!

The national furor escalated—if anyone could have thought that possible—at mid-afternoon on Thursday after national news stations began playing excerpts from the police interview tapes with Mr. Craig that were taken in the police station following the Senator’s arrest. By Thursday evening, commentator Chris Matthews was advertising a Hardball segment on whether the Craig incident would “derail the Republican Family Values agenda.”

But there is something about the Craig incident that disturbs me, deeply, and, no, it’s not the continued evidence of hypocrisy among some of our conservative Republican friends. Mr. Craig has been a consistent supporter of the Defense of Marriage laws that would deny marriage to gay couples (he has issued statements saying that “the appropriate definition of marriage is a union between one man and one woman”), and during the height of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, went on “Meet The Press” to announce that Mr. Clinton was “a bad boy, a naughty boy… probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.”

But that some of the people howling the loudest at the head of the mob are only trying to hide the fact that they are guilty of the same transgressions—in thought or deed—committed by the man whose house the mob is presently burning should come as no great surprise, and is merely one of the constants of the human experience.

What disturbs me is the way the Craig arrest, and subsequent guilty plea, and subsequent fall from grace, came about.

From all the available evidence, a plainclothes police sergeant was given the assignment of going into the men’s bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and sitting on the toilet, with his pants down to his ankles, waiting patiently for the man in the next stall to give some surreptitious signal that some form of sex is desired, and then arresting that man for doing so. Apparently the particular bathroom is a regular liason spot, and local police arrested several men in the sting when they tried to similarly solicit an undercover cop in the adjoining stall.

What a sad and tawdry little job that must be, waiting in a bathroom stall for men to come on to you, and what a sad and tawdry little nation we are for participation in the resultant public flogging—either as progressive-liberals giggling in delight at another Republican toppled, or conservatives covering, so to speak, their asses while pointedly turning their backs on him.

Let us be clear on the nature Mr. Craig’s admitted and observed transgressions.

This was not rape, or the taking advantage of an underage young male by some priest or coach or youth advisor or a middle age internet chatroom predator. It was a man entering a public airport bathroom that had a reputation as a meeting place for men attracted to men, and then enclosing himself in a stall and putting his briefcase—full of important, state papers, presumably—in front of the door to block any view, and then tapping out a code on the floor with his polished shoe in the hope that the anonymous man next door will find him in any way desirable, and want to spend with him a few moments pleasure or release.

What a horror of a life it must have been for Mr. Craig up until the moment the plainclothes officer flashed a badge instead of some other object under the stall wall, knowing there was always the danger that moment might come, knowing what an embarrassment to himself and to his family—now and for all time—that exposure of his actions would bring, knowing what his colleagues and his neighbors and the national press would most certainly say, but unable, with the weight of all that awful world in danger of falling upon him, to stop himself.

Yes, I know that more than hypocrisy, it is an abomination for a powerful office-holder—a United States Senator—to slip into bathroom stalls to have anonymous sexual encounters with other men, thereby breaking his own marriage vows, while simultaneously denying the right of gay and lesbian couples to have legally-sanctioned marriages in the midst of loving and monogamous relationships. On that score, in any event I do not advocate that Mr. Craig be absolved of all guilt (although a “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” sort of Christianity might appear to be in order from the professed Christians amongst us). All that being said, for my progressive friends, nothing in the current junior high chatter over Mr. Craig’s peccadilloes moves us closer to any larger sexual acceptance and understanding that would lead to a more inclusive national definition of marriage, a goal that many, if not most, progressives say they are working towards. Quite the contrary. By progressives tittering on about toe-tapping in the toilet, as tempting as this may seem in the current political climate, I believe it moves us further away.

There are important matters to be discussed here. About sexuality. And tolerance. And temptation. About what types of relationships and activities stabilizes our society, and what types of relationships and activities breaks it apart. About what type of rules by which we wish to govern our own individual lives. About how much—or how little—we believe our own beliefs should be imparted to or imposed upon the guy in the next stall. Yes, I confess, I laughed, at first, with most of my friends when I first heard of Mr. Craig’s story. But as the laughter and the self-righteous speeches die down, before the moment dies and our thoughts turn elsewhere, let us hope that the talk can turn to a more serious social debate. The question is not so much what this will the Craig affair do to the Republican Family Values agenda, which always had a bit of a hollow core to it, but what will be our national values as a whole.

The address 2411-31 Russell St. in southeast Berkeley is a small cluster of mid-century townhouses on the edge of a fashionable neighborhood where stately brown shingle and period revival houses claim most of the curb appeal and attention.

But this complex of more modest homes is, its own way, very liveable and contextual. One two bedroom unit—2427 Russell—is currently for sale at $534,900. John Koenigshofer is the listing agent, at Elmwood Realty. (www.erihomes.com)

There’s an open house this coming Sunday, Sept. 2, from 2 to 4 p.m.

2427 is tucked into the northeast corner of the larger of two buildings in the complex. It’s one of nine townhouses forming a shallow “C” facing the street and bracketing a smaller, two-unit, building. Encircling the property is a driveway that leads to 11 covered parking spaces along the rear property line.

Inside, the unit is a simple, two-story, cube. The front door enters a living room with a stairway in one corner, diagonally across from a dining nook. The dining area leads around into the kitchen, in the rear of the first floor.

Upstairs are two bedrooms—one large, one smaller—and a bath. The bedrooms look out from different sides of the building.

The units are “really well designed, they’re super-efficient” says David Lehrer, head of the homeowner’s association.

The architecture is quite uncomplicated, reflecting mid-century Modern values. Small features—like a sculptural metal railing on the staircase, simple tilework, a fluted bathroom window—substitute for more elaborate and extensive decorative details. Stairs and floors are finished hardwood. The unit has been nicely painted for staging and sale.

The kitchen appears to have several original features—tile counters with raised rims, a big triangular tile shelf perfect for plants above the sink and below the corner windows, and a built-in ironing board cabinet now fitted with tiny storage shelves. A skinny doorway leads to storage under the staircase.

There are small closets upstairs and down and storage closets by the parking, and the closet in the larger bedroom has a deep niche above the stairs for extra storage.

This could be a compact but quite liveable home for a single resident, a couple or two separate adults without children, or perhaps a single parent or family with one child.

Most units—including the one for sale—look out the front onto a courtyard, and have a rear door opening to the driveway or parking area. There’s a common laundry room at a back corner of the complex.

The landscaping along the public sidewalk is slightly raised and handsomely planted—in part by a UC Botanical Garden staffer who owns a unit—and the tranquil center court has a rectangle of lawn and flowering shrubs and other foundation plantings.

Simple principles also shape the exterior architecture. The roof pitch appears shallow, almost flat. Outside walls—painted in peaceful cream tones--have a band of red brick across the base, stucco above, and painted horizontal boards at the top. Some windows project slightly in very shallow bays.

I haven’t been able to find much of the history of this property, only some tantalizing possibilities. The realtor gives the year of construction as 1946, right after World War II ended.

Post-War housing was scarce in Berkeley, since wartime needs and labor shortages had diverted resources from private residential construction at the same time there was a big influx of immigrants into the East Bay to work in war industries.

One resident says he’s heard these units were built for UC professors. A long-time neighbor up the block recalls coming across early photos of the buildings in an archive of one-time U.S. Navy housing.

I’ve never heard of UC housing at this site, but it’s conceivable. As the war came to an end, the University had a number of long term and temporary arrangements to house not only home front students but a large number of veterans coming to college on the G.I. Bill. Further research awaits.

Whatever the early history, it has followed the trajectory of many of Berkeley’s small multi-unit complexes. Built to meet high housing demand, it spent decades in rental use. Conversion to condos followed in the late 1990s as detached single family homes in Berkeley became unaffordable for many residential buyers.

Today, the residents are “a cross section of Berkeley”, says Lehrer. Some are tenants who purchased their units; others bought after the condos were created. They include owner occupants who are “professionals, several teachers, some UC employees” including one professor, plus a few renters says Lehrer.

The property is self-managed, with a group of five residents heading up the homeowner’s association. Twice a year, Lehrer says, all the residents help out with a landscaping work party.

The complex lies near the southwest corner of the Willard neighborhood. The Elmwood shopping district is just three blocks east, up Russell Street.

Most of the buildings in that direction are large single family homes from the early 20th century when the area was developed as the Berry-Bangs Tract (see the Valentine/Dakin house article in the July 6 Planet for a more detailed neighborhood description).

Immediately to the west there once was a mansion on a huge lot between Russell and Oregon, dating to when south Telegraph was a pleasant residential street with large lots and homes. The house was torn down in the 1960s and replaced with a bland, six-story, office building partially ringed by a large parking lot.

If you visit 2427 Russell also walk one street north to the 2400 block of Oregon Street to see an eclectic row of houses ranging from a huge, white columned,, house to what may be southeast Berkeley’s smallest detached home on a postage stamp lot.

Or go up Russell and south on Regent Street to one of Berkeley’s cutest bungalow courts with a semicircle of doll-house cottages, the Presbyterian Mission Homes, used by clergy families on sabbatical.

There’s public transportation nearby on Ashby and Telegraph. Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, and the Telegraph Andronicos are within easy walking distance, as are Le Conte Elementary School, Willard Junior High, and the Willard Swim Center and park. Alta Bates Hospital is a few blocks south, and immediately east of the condo unit is an older house inconspicuously used for medical offices.

Although just a block north of busy Ashby, this stretch of Russell Street is relatively quiet, despite the installation a few years ago of a largely unneeded traffic signal at the Telegraph intersection. Russell is a City “bicycle boulevard,” blocked to through traffic west of College.

In this neighborhood scattered pre-war two and three-story apartment buildings—some in courtyard designs—generally harmonize with the surrounding single family homes in the way that later 1950s/60s apartment buildings—and many present day “infill” buildings—don’t.

I decided to write about this Russell Street property in part because it has several qualities that should be kept in mind by those so anxious to make Berkeley more “liveable” by building more multi-unit housing.

By any objective standard this eleven-unit property is fairly dense. Three free-standing Berkeley homes—or two suburban ranch houses, or one Marin County or Menlo Park manse—would fit on a land parcel this size.

But these units don’t feel crowded. They share one or two side walls, but there’s no one living above or below. Several have windows on three sides. The residents get light and air. The lack of private yard space would be a drawback for some, but fine for non-gardeners. Units have separate, ground level, entrances and porches.

At two stories this housing doesn’t tower above its detached residential neighbors. It fits in along the street, with setbacks and landscaped space. The development doesn’t include the security gates and grates, walls and fences, under-building parking and ostentatious “loft” interiors that make too many new multi-unit properties bulky and forbidding places.

By having a mix of single family homes and properties like this (as well as lots of hidden housing in backyard cottages, in-law units, flats, and attics) a Berkeley neighborhood can be, in reality, relatively dense while still feeling fairly green and suburban in the most positive sense.

Photograph by Steven Finacom. 2427 Russell fits into a sunny corner of the townhouse courtyard.

Containers for planting are limited only by your imagination—and a few realities, what plants need.

Their roots need access to oxygen, and that gets ignored way too often. Out of sight, out of mind, evidently. That mistake happens in the ground, too: people bury tree roots under paving or a few extra feet of soil, and then wonder why their prized tree is dying.

Oxygen can’t get to roots when they’re underwater, a surprisingly common problem with container plants. People actually put plants into containers with no drainage holes.

The poor plants stand in water, which despite being two-thirds oxygen can’t deliver that element to roots. The fact that one can sometimes get away with it—that infrequent watering, well-aerated soil, a very tough plant, and dumb luck come together just long and often enough—perpetuates the bad habit.

If you have a pot without drainage and it absolutely needs a plant, as opposed to your knitting-needle collection or the cat’s drinking water, you have choices. Drill holes in the bottom, and don’t be stingy; make several and make each an inch wide.

Too scary? Find a real plant pot small enough to fit inside, and pot your plant in that. Take it out to water it, or at least pour the leftovers out after you water.

If you have a sunny enough spot—they’re almost always sun-lovers—and your non-draining pot is wide and shallow enough, you might adopt a carnivorous plant: a Venus’ flytrap, a sundew, or a handsome hooded Sarracenia, “pitcher plant.”

These do well when their pots sit in shallow water; most are originally swamp or freshwater marsh plants. Use distilled water, or its “purified” equivalent.

Unglazed clay is the best material for a plant pot. It’s porous enough to let water evaporate through it, to “breathe.” It’s also heavy, brittle, and often homely.

Glazed ceramic pots can be prettier, and generally are at least a bit cool inside to keep roots happier. Wooden boxes and half-barrels have that virtue too, but they decay faster. Biodegradable is good, if it doesn’t involve, say, fungi that also attack roots.

Those ubiquitous black plastic nursery cans are hard on plants. They’re meant to be temporary vehicles, not permanent homes. In plastic, it’s easier to create an anaerobic situation because the only way water can escape is through the holes in the bottom, which sometimes get blocked by roots.

The other problem with most nursery cans is that they’re black. Black plastic absorbs heat very fast. You can cook your poor plant’s roots to death in a day when the sun’s angle changes with the season.

If you’re stuck with plastic, at least look for tan or cream-colored cans. I’ve even seen bright pink one-gallon horrors. As you like it; I’m not playing Martha Stewart here.

Tufa, a light porous stone, has ideal drainage and a good imitation, “hypertufa,” can be mixed up and molded.

There’s a “Beginning Hypertufa Trough Construction” class at the Tilden Botanic Garden on Sunday, October 14, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. $65. See to www.nativeplants.org/classes.html for a registration form.

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

The Europeans have had it all over us for some decades when it comes to energy efficiency. This might have something to do with a political attitude toward wasting energy or sheer economy. In any event, our European brothers and sisters are more inclined to pinch a BTU (that a British Thermal Unit for those of you new to the energy game).

One of the things that they’ve long embraced has been small, “on-demand,” “flash” or “tankless” water heaters. Before I get into a description of what an on-demand water heater is, let’s take a brief look at “tanked” conventional water heaters.

A conventional gas water heater (electric water heaters are worthy of discussion but are relatively rare in our area) is made up of a vertically mounted water tank (usually 30-50 gallons) with a gas burner mounted at the bottom. Water is heated in the tank until it reaches the set temperature (adjustable at the front with a non-specific dial, i.e. warm, hot, hotter) and the water is held at that temperature by the intermittent operation of the burner. In other words, the burner comes on many times each day to keep the water at the desired temperature. This is true whether you are home, sleeping or at work. All so that you’ll be able to enjoy a nice hot shower whenever you’re in the mood.

This requires a lot more energy and cost than if you heated the water as you needed it (which we’ll get back to that in a little while).

These water heaters take up several square feet of space and need to be mounted on a floor or stand (in a garage, they should be placed on a stand so that the flame is at least 18” above the floor to prevent ignition of gas fumes unless a special FVIR model is used).

Water heaters are also very heavy and can become a bull in a china shop during an earthquake. If they do move more than a tiny bit during an earthquake they can break their gas lines and cause a gas build-up and explosion. This is one of the really serious seismic issues everyone should be looking at and every “tanked” water heater should be heavily strapped, top and bottom (and a third if they’re over 50 gallons).

Lastly, a conventional water heater runs out of hot water after a while and must “recover” which can take anywhere from 15-45 minutes, depending on the model. In short, your shower is over at some point.

An on-demand water heater is different from this conventional gas model in several respects. First, there’s no tank (I’m not actually this stupid. Yes, of course you knew that). Instead, there is a very long coil of tubing seated above a large burner. When you turn on your hot tap, water begins to flow through the coil and a sensor picks up the movement. The burner comes on and heats the water as it flows through the coil. The whole heating process takes a few seconds and hot water emerges at the other end of the coil of tubing. You have hot water in a few seconds at your point of use (shower, sink, laundry).

This means that you get to have hot water for as long as you want. It never run out. You can stay in the shower all afternoon! What a concept.

Because you are only heating water when you need it, you end up saving serious money on your gas bill. You also save the earth a little bit by decreasing green house gas emission (CO2) from your home.

You may save two hundred or more dollars per year with a unit like this. Because these units are not filled with many gallons of water, they are much lighter and much less likely to move during an earthquake. This means that the likelihood of a gas explosion after an earthquake is much less. The units are typically bolted to a wall as a part of their normal installation and many models are designed to be hung on an exterior wall. These features decrease gas danger even further.

Lastly, I frequently get asked by my clients how we can get the water heater out of laundry room or kitchen to make more room and the installation of an on-demand on an outside wall is often my response. Although these “new wave” of water heaters are costlier, they can give you back a room that’s been taken over by that looming old figure by the stove. With the increased efficiency, lower operating cost, added interior space and increased seismic safety, it’s hard to argue against these newcomers, even at their higher cost.

A number of models exist (I’m only looking at gas units at this point, but electrics do exist) and new ones are coming along every year. If you decide to go this route, make sure you get a large enough model so that you don’t run out of water when you’re running shower, laundry and sink. Although these units keep producing hot water, they do have limits on how much they produce per minute. It is best to talk to an expert about the model that’s right for you. A downside you should expect with these units is that you will have to turn the water to a good flow to get them to kick on. They can generally be throttled down somewhat afterwards.

Life is good. You can finally achieve your life’s goal of staying in the shower all afternoon.

The above article was published in the Berkeley Daily Planet in June 2005 and, since you’ve all gotten so much smarter since then, there are some finer points I think you’re now ready to handle so here’s a little update:

On demand water heaters do a lot of heating in a very short time and so need a huge burner (about three times as powerful as your central furnace). This means that they need a big gas line.

When installing one, you should expect to have to provide at least a three-fourth of an inch gas line to the unit. If you’re more than about 30 feet away, it may have to be 1 inch. If you get a more powerful unit, the gas line may be bigger. This calculation is a critical part of the plumber’s job. Putting the device closer to the gas main is a good idea since it can not only decrease the length (and cost) of the gas piping, it can also decrease the size (and more cost) of the gas piping. Try to put the unit on the outside of the house and on the same side as your gas main (unless your main is on the front since this will look lousy).

It now looks as though these devices have a very bad relationship with galvanized water pipe and can be killed in as little as two years if the piping leading to them is galvanized steel (the old stuff). For now, there doesn’t seem to be a service repair for the part that gets damaged by steel so it’s very important that you have your unit installed with copper piping coming to the unit from the street (3/4” is best for most houses).

Lastly, placement of the unit on the outside can save hundreds of dollars on the purchase of very expensive stainless steel flue piping as well as creating more inside space. Remember how these burn a whole lotta gas. Well, the corrosion caused by this is too much for the common double-wall metal flue that we usually love so, if you have your unit inside (including inside your basement, garage or crawlspace) you have to spend mucho bucks on Class 3 stainless flue pipe. This can easily add hundreds of dollars SO, save the money and put it out with the cat. Make sure that the unit is at least a couple of feet away from (and not below) an openable window so that the exhaust doesn’t blow back inside. Be proud if you make this bold move. It’s a not-all-that-small part of saving the planet.

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

A birch is about as exotic as a banana here, and maybe they’re both ubiquitous in people’s front yards for similar nostalgic reasons—or maybe instead because they’re so outrageous when you know where you are.

They’re both thirsty, so it’s good to keep them in the well-watered zone of the garden. A cluster of birches looks natural with a patch of lawngrass and/or a fern, an understory flower or two. It doesn’t take acres to evoke the Eastern North American forests in their most tender-looking moods.

By some standards, of course, birch is tough as nails. Most of the several birch species need plenty of water but other than that, they’re sturdy; they stand up just fine to New England, Alaskan, and Siberian winters and they’re resourceful enough to use as pioneer plants on “reclaimed” culm dumps and other mining scars. The sight of white-barked paper birches on a black anthracite spoilbank is one of those Proustian guilty pleasures for me. I know it’s devastation, but those trees look so starkly handsome I still have to smile.

Lots of birches have tan or reddish bark and they’re generally good-looking too, but the emblematic birch, the one that gets photographed against blue-white snow or a brilliant green spring understory has white bark. Here, it’s usually the North American native paper or white birch (Betula papyrifera), gray birch (B. populifolia) in those postcard photos and the European white birch (B. pendula) in our gardens.

This time of year, people often panic at the sight of blackened, soot-covered, and bug-riddled leaves on their birches. All the birch species I know of are susceptible to aphids, and aphid droppings—one of several such excretions called “honeydew” because they do in fact taste sweet—grow various kinds of mold and mildew readily, on the leaf surfaces and on any object beneath them.

(That’s pretty much what’s going on with those poor beleaguered tuliptrees on University Avenue, by the way. Yes, they should be replaced, but a few at a time and not during nesting season please! It’s a shame: they’re beautiful trees but they’re really happier in a more lush situation like a lawn.)

My earnest counsel about aphid-infested birches? Do nothing. The trees are deciduous and will drop their leaves in a month or two anyway, bugs and all. Meanwhile you have the ideal ladybird beetle nursery and that’s what you’ll want around next spring when the aphids return. Look at whatever leaves are in reach and see if you don’t have some of those ferocious black alligator-looking ladybeetle youngsters there. The kids eat more aphids than the adults do, as kids are wont. Cherish them.

While I’m dishing advice and barking orders: I’ve notice that some people have the unsavory habit of topping their birches, cutting the top several feet of the tree right off. What’s up with that? Aside from destroying the natural grace of the tree, it’s slow murder, and what branches do arise from the mutilated trunk will be weakly attached—originating only from the edge of the trunk—and so prone to snapping off when they grow heavy enough to be more than twigs. Stop that right now.

Aside from the Robert Frost poem about “a swinger of birches” and the birchbark canoe whose survival John McPhee eloquently celebrated, birches figure in our culture, or at least our décor, largely as a signifier of the demi-wilderness, the cabin in the woods that’s just a bit beyond dirt flooring, the sort of thing LL Bean touts. The elegant white bark gets used for picture frames and occasional furniture.

Once upon a time it made paper, just as I thought it must when I was a kid. Historic “frontier” documents exist that are scrawled and signed on a wide strip peeled right off the tree. It seems irresistible for the sort of folks who write on living trees, too, as the “Fred + Chloe 4 ever” eventually becomes something like a keloid, black and prominent against the white, ready to embarrass Fred + Chloe’s kids unto the third generation.

My own cultural madeline featuring birches—aside from making strictly decorative porridge and bread out of the ripe catkins to go with the mulberries we gorged on in summer—is birch beer. Cook’s Illustrated site www.cooks.com/rec has a recipe for real beer-type birch beer made with birch sap and yeast. What I remember, though, is a red soda somewhat like root beer but less heavy. Apparently it’s a Pennsylvania Dutch thing, judging by its distribution.

My sister Ellen took a load of it along with a few pounds of garlic ring bologna and Utz’s potato chips down to Orlando a couple of weeks ago to celebrate her daughter’s graduation from nursing school. The exotic-or-nostalgic cuisine got an enthusiastic reception there. Now I’m wondering how well it would make it through the average airport.

And I miss my sister, too.

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. Birch trees in their unmangled natural form. These, like many trees this year, are showing early fall color.

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Green Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section.

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “The Heavens Call” at 7 p.m. and “Zero City” at 8:45 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

I’m dying! Bring in the gravediggers. Let the mourners come.” On a set out of a Gothic fairytale (designed by Kim A. Tolman)—a crypt with a crazy rose window above, a hovering eye and the Mona Lisa with her face half covered by a hand as she gazes out over the audience, a chessboard below as flooring—Saul Strange (David Usner, himself a skydiver) writhes on his seeming deathbed, rigged with parachute lines, in an upbeat final agony, attended by his family with painted faces (and occasionally a fantastic creature, a kind of celestial butoh drag queen, played by Kinji Hayashi).

But on being wished “Happy Birthday, Grandpa!” by May Strange (Maikiko James), who presents him with his old combat medal and ribbon she’s discovered, and donning an O.D. jacket with epaulets and fringe over longjohns and (gold Arabian Nights slippers) taken from a coffin-shaped armoire, the old campaigner’s mournful talk turns to thoughts of restaurants and food.

As Helen Pau’s creation, which she wrote and directed, shifts gears, and shifts again and again, to settle in (though not for long) at the “Carnal Table” that figures as the subtitle of Viaticum, an Incubator 16 production going into its final weekend at Live Oak Theatre.

It’s not so much the dishes served at that fleshly board as the manner in which the feast unfolds that gives Viaticum its ultrachromatic, even atonal resonance. Monologue follows repartee after vignette, flowing right along like a branching stream into various landscapes, the connectives (as in a dream) quickly brushed over, or eliminated. It’s like a Mannerist painting, in which all kinds of action exists side-by-side in a variety of perspectives on the same canvas—nervewracking to take in all at once, but enjoyable in courses, once the spectator sits back and partakes in the procession of offerings, one by one, and lets it all correspond in its own way, mostly through wry (even skewed) humor.

The deathbed, turned round, becomes the table of a Last Supper that easily outdoes any Da Vinci Code blather (and Leonardo’s name and work are invoked, under the shy Mona Lisa hovering above, just as Lewis Carroll seems to be in the wings, ready to step on the chessboard, or present in the sub-sub-title/description of “A TragicFarce in Ten Fits,” à la his “Hunting of the Snark”).

The motifs jostle each other awkwardly, visually and verbally, as in a de Chirico painting, or a book by his prolific brother Savinio. In some ways less Surrealist (in the fullbore Parisian sense) than pre- and para-Surrealist, Viaticum plays off the mad Gothic sensibilities of, say, Poe or Comte de Lautreamont, dragooned as predecessors by Andre Breton’s gang—or the fascination with eccentric popular genres, like pirates, porn, secret agents and salacious nuns—all served up with a dollop of scatology and oodles of incest.

Auditors straining for a plot may be hard pressed to respond, and some will find Viaticum irritating or “too conceptual” if they focus on the foreground, which evaporates constantly over the horizon or off the vanishing points. Better to take in the textures of offbeat stories spinning out, as the family of characters shifts shape to suit whatever gambit they’re on, all accompanied by cello (often in pizzicato), pennywhistle and toy piano by musical trouper Alex Kelly.

The family (including Jacquie Duckworth and Steve Budd) moves through its various characterizations, anchored by the constants: parents/grandparents Saul and Jean Beatrice—Michaela Greeley, excellent in an almost deadpan performance, whether echoing the tail ends of others’ lines like a parrot as she serves as dresser and factotum in brown karate drag, or in basic black, hat and veil, squatting on an enormous white pawn, reeling out long lines of Strindbergian monologue.

An unusual stage event, especially to end a slower summer than the past two. With another original out there like George Charbak’s Gilgamesh, also ending this weekend, it makes for a picaresque time of show-hopping in Berkeley, just like Helen Pau’s peripatetic script ... ready to praise the Prince of Darkness at any moment, while excusing oneself to run off to prayers!

Time is running out to see a superb and fascinating photography exhibit at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. “Think While You Shoot!” a career-spanning retrospective of the tremendously varied body of work by Hungarian-born photographer Martin Munkacsi, runs through Sept. 16.

Munkacsi could do it all—and with style, insight, and humor. From sports and action to war and politics, from bathing beauties to portraits and fashion, from pop culture to gripping photojournalism, the versatile Munkacsi seemed to master every subject he took on.

He began his career in Hungary, working primarily as a sports photographer, capturing athletes in motion with crystal-clear precision. The exhibit begins with some of this early work. One image shows a goalkeeper lunging, frozen in time while floating horizontally above the ground with outstretched arms, straining for a ball that passes just out of reach. Another shot shows the gritty rush of speed as a motorcyclist crashes through a puddle, eyes squinting as dark jets of mud splash up all around him.

In the late 1920s Munkacsi made his way to Berlin, where he took a job with the leading German photo weekly Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, for which he traveled the world in search of photojournalistic fodder. Some of his most striking images from this era present a radical departure from his usual joyous photographs, as he documented the transfer of power from German President Paul von Hindenburg to Adolf Hitler.

The force of Munkacsi’s shots of German soldiers on the march is only intensified by their placement in the gallery opposite a long wall of lighthearted portraits of beautiful young women frolicking on sun-soaked beaches. The rise of the Nazis prompted the Jewish photographer to emigrate to the United States, where he took a job with Harper’s Bazaar. The bathing beauty portraits illustrate how Munkacsi immediately influenced his profession: he transformed fashion photography from a static, studio-bound form to a celebration of the body in action, producing kinetic, exuberant photographs of models in motion outdoors, on city streets and beaches. His models didn’t just strike a pose and let their finery hang in luxurious folds; they walked, they ran, they jumped and danced.

Also on view are shots that display Munkacsi’s sense of humor and his curiosity about people. At some point he stopped shooting the athletes at sporting events and focused his camera instead on the spectators, making for a delightful series of images that bring out the emotion—heartache, anticipation, and joy—of people watching other people. This semi-voyeuristic approach comes to full fruition in another striking display: Munkacsi’s series of a couple riding a double-decker bus. The body language in these three photographs suggests that a particularly intimate conversation is taking place against the shifting backdrop of urban streets. One of Munkacsi’s most noteworthy talents was this ability to distill an image in such a way that it suggests meanings and plot lines and happenings far beyond what is within the frame.

Other images take a more comic approach. One shows a skier making his way uphill, the criss-crossing pattern of his splayed ski prints in the snow behind him sharply telling of his cumbersome journey. Another shot looks down on a field full of schoolchildren reclining for what appears to be an impromptu nap or perhaps a group cloud-watching session. Munkacsi’s camera transforms them into a haphazard geometric pattern without losing the human appeal of a lazy afternoon spent lolling in the grass with a few dozen friends.

Munkacsi had a gift for finding the humanity in everything he photographed. And though his images of the rise of the Nazis and his respectful but harrowingly intimate documentation of the death and sorrow of a mine disaster may be stirring, jarring, and powerful, his most lasting contribution to photography is the joyful exuberance he brought to his best work.

The address 2411-31 Russell St. in southeast Berkeley is a small cluster of mid-century townhouses on the edge of a fashionable neighborhood where stately brown shingle and period revival houses claim most of the curb appeal and attention.

But this complex of more modest homes is, its own way, very liveable and contextual. One two bedroom unit—2427 Russell—is currently for sale at $534,900. John Koenigshofer is the listing agent, at Elmwood Realty. (www.erihomes.com)

There’s an open house this coming Sunday, Sept. 2, from 2 to 4 p.m.

2427 is tucked into the northeast corner of the larger of two buildings in the complex. It’s one of nine townhouses forming a shallow “C” facing the street and bracketing a smaller, two-unit, building. Encircling the property is a driveway that leads to 11 covered parking spaces along the rear property line.

Inside, the unit is a simple, two-story, cube. The front door enters a living room with a stairway in one corner, diagonally across from a dining nook. The dining area leads around into the kitchen, in the rear of the first floor.

Upstairs are two bedrooms—one large, one smaller—and a bath. The bedrooms look out from different sides of the building.

The units are “really well designed, they’re super-efficient” says David Lehrer, head of the homeowner’s association.

The architecture is quite uncomplicated, reflecting mid-century Modern values. Small features—like a sculptural metal railing on the staircase, simple tilework, a fluted bathroom window—substitute for more elaborate and extensive decorative details. Stairs and floors are finished hardwood. The unit has been nicely painted for staging and sale.

The kitchen appears to have several original features—tile counters with raised rims, a big triangular tile shelf perfect for plants above the sink and below the corner windows, and a built-in ironing board cabinet now fitted with tiny storage shelves. A skinny doorway leads to storage under the staircase.

There are small closets upstairs and down and storage closets by the parking, and the closet in the larger bedroom has a deep niche above the stairs for extra storage.

This could be a compact but quite liveable home for a single resident, a couple or two separate adults without children, or perhaps a single parent or family with one child.

Most units—including the one for sale—look out the front onto a courtyard, and have a rear door opening to the driveway or parking area. There’s a common laundry room at a back corner of the complex.

The landscaping along the public sidewalk is slightly raised and handsomely planted—in part by a UC Botanical Garden staffer who owns a unit—and the tranquil center court has a rectangle of lawn and flowering shrubs and other foundation plantings.

Simple principles also shape the exterior architecture. The roof pitch appears shallow, almost flat. Outside walls—painted in peaceful cream tones--have a band of red brick across the base, stucco above, and painted horizontal boards at the top. Some windows project slightly in very shallow bays.

I haven’t been able to find much of the history of this property, only some tantalizing possibilities. The realtor gives the year of construction as 1946, right after World War II ended.

Post-War housing was scarce in Berkeley, since wartime needs and labor shortages had diverted resources from private residential construction at the same time there was a big influx of immigrants into the East Bay to work in war industries.

One resident says he’s heard these units were built for UC professors. A long-time neighbor up the block recalls coming across early photos of the buildings in an archive of one-time U.S. Navy housing.

I’ve never heard of UC housing at this site, but it’s conceivable. As the war came to an end, the University had a number of long term and temporary arrangements to house not only home front students but a large number of veterans coming to college on the G.I. Bill. Further research awaits.

Whatever the early history, it has followed the trajectory of many of Berkeley’s small multi-unit complexes. Built to meet high housing demand, it spent decades in rental use. Conversion to condos followed in the late 1990s as detached single family homes in Berkeley became unaffordable for many residential buyers.

Today, the residents are “a cross section of Berkeley”, says Lehrer. Some are tenants who purchased their units; others bought after the condos were created. They include owner occupants who are “professionals, several teachers, some UC employees” including one professor, plus a few renters says Lehrer.

The property is self-managed, with a group of five residents heading up the homeowner’s association. Twice a year, Lehrer says, all the residents help out with a landscaping work party.

The complex lies near the southwest corner of the Willard neighborhood. The Elmwood shopping district is just three blocks east, up Russell Street.

Most of the buildings in that direction are large single family homes from the early 20th century when the area was developed as the Berry-Bangs Tract (see the Valentine/Dakin house article in the July 6 Planet for a more detailed neighborhood description).

Immediately to the west there once was a mansion on a huge lot between Russell and Oregon, dating to when south Telegraph was a pleasant residential street with large lots and homes. The house was torn down in the 1960s and replaced with a bland, six-story, office building partially ringed by a large parking lot.

If you visit 2427 Russell also walk one street north to the 2400 block of Oregon Street to see an eclectic row of houses ranging from a huge, white columned,, house to what may be southeast Berkeley’s smallest detached home on a postage stamp lot.

Or go up Russell and south on Regent Street to one of Berkeley’s cutest bungalow courts with a semicircle of doll-house cottages, the Presbyterian Mission Homes, used by clergy families on sabbatical.

There’s public transportation nearby on Ashby and Telegraph. Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, and the Telegraph Andronicos are within easy walking distance, as are Le Conte Elementary School, Willard Junior High, and the Willard Swim Center and park. Alta Bates Hospital is a few blocks south, and immediately east of the condo unit is an older house inconspicuously used for medical offices.

Although just a block north of busy Ashby, this stretch of Russell Street is relatively quiet, despite the installation a few years ago of a largely unneeded traffic signal at the Telegraph intersection. Russell is a City “bicycle boulevard,” blocked to through traffic west of College.

In this neighborhood scattered pre-war two and three-story apartment buildings—some in courtyard designs—generally harmonize with the surrounding single family homes in the way that later 1950s/60s apartment buildings—and many present day “infill” buildings—don’t.

I decided to write about this Russell Street property in part because it has several qualities that should be kept in mind by those so anxious to make Berkeley more “liveable” by building more multi-unit housing.

By any objective standard this eleven-unit property is fairly dense. Three free-standing Berkeley homes—or two suburban ranch houses, or one Marin County or Menlo Park manse—would fit on a land parcel this size.

But these units don’t feel crowded. They share one or two side walls, but there’s no one living above or below. Several have windows on three sides. The residents get light and air. The lack of private yard space would be a drawback for some, but fine for non-gardeners. Units have separate, ground level, entrances and porches.

At two stories this housing doesn’t tower above its detached residential neighbors. It fits in along the street, with setbacks and landscaped space. The development doesn’t include the security gates and grates, walls and fences, under-building parking and ostentatious “loft” interiors that make too many new multi-unit properties bulky and forbidding places.

By having a mix of single family homes and properties like this (as well as lots of hidden housing in backyard cottages, in-law units, flats, and attics) a Berkeley neighborhood can be, in reality, relatively dense while still feeling fairly green and suburban in the most positive sense.

Photograph by Steven Finacom. 2427 Russell fits into a sunny corner of the townhouse courtyard.

Containers for planting are limited only by your imagination—and a few realities, what plants need.

Their roots need access to oxygen, and that gets ignored way too often. Out of sight, out of mind, evidently. That mistake happens in the ground, too: people bury tree roots under paving or a few extra feet of soil, and then wonder why their prized tree is dying.

Oxygen can’t get to roots when they’re underwater, a surprisingly common problem with container plants. People actually put plants into containers with no drainage holes.

The poor plants stand in water, which despite being two-thirds oxygen can’t deliver that element to roots. The fact that one can sometimes get away with it—that infrequent watering, well-aerated soil, a very tough plant, and dumb luck come together just long and often enough—perpetuates the bad habit.

If you have a pot without drainage and it absolutely needs a plant, as opposed to your knitting-needle collection or the cat’s drinking water, you have choices. Drill holes in the bottom, and don’t be stingy; make several and make each an inch wide.

Too scary? Find a real plant pot small enough to fit inside, and pot your plant in that. Take it out to water it, or at least pour the leftovers out after you water.

If you have a sunny enough spot—they’re almost always sun-lovers—and your non-draining pot is wide and shallow enough, you might adopt a carnivorous plant: a Venus’ flytrap, a sundew, or a handsome hooded Sarracenia, “pitcher plant.”

These do well when their pots sit in shallow water; most are originally swamp or freshwater marsh plants. Use distilled water, or its “purified” equivalent.

Unglazed clay is the best material for a plant pot. It’s porous enough to let water evaporate through it, to “breathe.” It’s also heavy, brittle, and often homely.

Glazed ceramic pots can be prettier, and generally are at least a bit cool inside to keep roots happier. Wooden boxes and half-barrels have that virtue too, but they decay faster. Biodegradable is good, if it doesn’t involve, say, fungi that also attack roots.

Those ubiquitous black plastic nursery cans are hard on plants. They’re meant to be temporary vehicles, not permanent homes. In plastic, it’s easier to create an anaerobic situation because the only way water can escape is through the holes in the bottom, which sometimes get blocked by roots.

The other problem with most nursery cans is that they’re black. Black plastic absorbs heat very fast. You can cook your poor plant’s roots to death in a day when the sun’s angle changes with the season.

If you’re stuck with plastic, at least look for tan or cream-colored cans. I’ve even seen bright pink one-gallon horrors. As you like it; I’m not playing Martha Stewart here.

Tufa, a light porous stone, has ideal drainage and a good imitation, “hypertufa,” can be mixed up and molded.

There’s a “Beginning Hypertufa Trough Construction” class at the Tilden Botanic Garden on Sunday, October 14, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. $65. See to www.nativeplants.org/classes.html for a registration form.

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

The Europeans have had it all over us for some decades when it comes to energy efficiency. This might have something to do with a political attitude toward wasting energy or sheer economy. In any event, our European brothers and sisters are more inclined to pinch a BTU (that a British Thermal Unit for those of you new to the energy game).

One of the things that they’ve long embraced has been small, “on-demand,” “flash” or “tankless” water heaters. Before I get into a description of what an on-demand water heater is, let’s take a brief look at “tanked” conventional water heaters.

A conventional gas water heater (electric water heaters are worthy of discussion but are relatively rare in our area) is made up of a vertically mounted water tank (usually 30-50 gallons) with a gas burner mounted at the bottom. Water is heated in the tank until it reaches the set temperature (adjustable at the front with a non-specific dial, i.e. warm, hot, hotter) and the water is held at that temperature by the intermittent operation of the burner. In other words, the burner comes on many times each day to keep the water at the desired temperature. This is true whether you are home, sleeping or at work. All so that you’ll be able to enjoy a nice hot shower whenever you’re in the mood.

This requires a lot more energy and cost than if you heated the water as you needed it (which we’ll get back to that in a little while).

These water heaters take up several square feet of space and need to be mounted on a floor or stand (in a garage, they should be placed on a stand so that the flame is at least 18” above the floor to prevent ignition of gas fumes unless a special FVIR model is used).

Water heaters are also very heavy and can become a bull in a china shop during an earthquake. If they do move more than a tiny bit during an earthquake they can break their gas lines and cause a gas build-up and explosion. This is one of the really serious seismic issues everyone should be looking at and every “tanked” water heater should be heavily strapped, top and bottom (and a third if they’re over 50 gallons).

Lastly, a conventional water heater runs out of hot water after a while and must “recover” which can take anywhere from 15-45 minutes, depending on the model. In short, your shower is over at some point.

An on-demand water heater is different from this conventional gas model in several respects. First, there’s no tank (I’m not actually this stupid. Yes, of course you knew that). Instead, there is a very long coil of tubing seated above a large burner. When you turn on your hot tap, water begins to flow through the coil and a sensor picks up the movement. The burner comes on and heats the water as it flows through the coil. The whole heating process takes a few seconds and hot water emerges at the other end of the coil of tubing. You have hot water in a few seconds at your point of use (shower, sink, laundry).

This means that you get to have hot water for as long as you want. It never run out. You can stay in the shower all afternoon! What a concept.

Because you are only heating water when you need it, you end up saving serious money on your gas bill. You also save the earth a little bit by decreasing green house gas emission (CO2) from your home.

You may save two hundred or more dollars per year with a unit like this. Because these units are not filled with many gallons of water, they are much lighter and much less likely to move during an earthquake. This means that the likelihood of a gas explosion after an earthquake is much less. The units are typically bolted to a wall as a part of their normal installation and many models are designed to be hung on an exterior wall. These features decrease gas danger even further.

Lastly, I frequently get asked by my clients how we can get the water heater out of laundry room or kitchen to make more room and the installation of an on-demand on an outside wall is often my response. Although these “new wave” of water heaters are costlier, they can give you back a room that’s been taken over by that looming old figure by the stove. With the increased efficiency, lower operating cost, added interior space and increased seismic safety, it’s hard to argue against these newcomers, even at their higher cost.

A number of models exist (I’m only looking at gas units at this point, but electrics do exist) and new ones are coming along every year. If you decide to go this route, make sure you get a large enough model so that you don’t run out of water when you’re running shower, laundry and sink. Although these units keep producing hot water, they do have limits on how much they produce per minute. It is best to talk to an expert about the model that’s right for you. A downside you should expect with these units is that you will have to turn the water to a good flow to get them to kick on. They can generally be throttled down somewhat afterwards.

Life is good. You can finally achieve your life’s goal of staying in the shower all afternoon.

The above article was published in the Berkeley Daily Planet in June 2005 and, since you’ve all gotten so much smarter since then, there are some finer points I think you’re now ready to handle so here’s a little update:

On demand water heaters do a lot of heating in a very short time and so need a huge burner (about three times as powerful as your central furnace). This means that they need a big gas line.

When installing one, you should expect to have to provide at least a three-fourth of an inch gas line to the unit. If you’re more than about 30 feet away, it may have to be 1 inch. If you get a more powerful unit, the gas line may be bigger. This calculation is a critical part of the plumber’s job. Putting the device closer to the gas main is a good idea since it can not only decrease the length (and cost) of the gas piping, it can also decrease the size (and more cost) of the gas piping. Try to put the unit on the outside of the house and on the same side as your gas main (unless your main is on the front since this will look lousy).

It now looks as though these devices have a very bad relationship with galvanized water pipe and can be killed in as little as two years if the piping leading to them is galvanized steel (the old stuff). For now, there doesn’t seem to be a service repair for the part that gets damaged by steel so it’s very important that you have your unit installed with copper piping coming to the unit from the street (3/4” is best for most houses).

Lastly, placement of the unit on the outside can save hundreds of dollars on the purchase of very expensive stainless steel flue piping as well as creating more inside space. Remember how these burn a whole lotta gas. Well, the corrosion caused by this is too much for the common double-wall metal flue that we usually love so, if you have your unit inside (including inside your basement, garage or crawlspace) you have to spend mucho bucks on Class 3 stainless flue pipe. This can easily add hundreds of dollars SO, save the money and put it out with the cat. Make sure that the unit is at least a couple of feet away from (and not below) an openable window so that the exhaust doesn’t blow back inside. Be proud if you make this bold move. It’s a not-all-that-small part of saving the planet.

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com

“This is my Home” a film on the struggle of displaced public housing residents in post-Katrina New Orleans, at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way, under the Sather Gate Parking Garage. 848-1196.

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310.

SATURDAY, SEPT. 1

Remembrance, Reflection, and Recommitment on the 20th Anniversary of the attempt to stop the naval weapons shipment to Central America at 10 a.m. at the tracks opposite the Concord Naval Weapons Station, off Highway 4 on Port Chicago Hwy North, where the tracks cross the road. 528-5403. NurembergReunion@comcast.net

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

The Scoop on Ponds Learn how our pond critters have held up through the dry summer at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

Read the Signs Learn how to find out where animlas have been and what they were doing, on a walk around Jewel Lake. Meet at 1 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.

SUNDAY, SEPT. 2

Poetry Garden Celebration from 1 to 3 p.m. on the corner of Milvia and Lincoln at Berkeley Arts Magnet School. Open mic for poetry performance and paper and pencils for on the spot poetic inspiration. Children especially welcome. 548-1707. mccoatty@hotmail.com

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712.

MONDAY, SEPT. 3

Labor Day Open House at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park, with crafts, nature walk,s and farm activities from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 525-2233.

TUESDAY, SEPT. 4

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Wildcat Canyon. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233.

“What Happened to the Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville High School Seniors Who Did Not Pass the Exit Exam in 2006 and 2007?” Brown bag lunch with Helene Lecar at noon at Albany Library, at Marin and Masonic Aves., Albany. Sponsored by the League of Women Voters. 843-8824.

“Nature and Nurture: The Challenge for Adoptees” a six-week class on Tues. from 7 to 9 p.m. at Albany High School, 655 Key Route Blvd. Cost is $50. To register call 559-6580.

“Please Vote for Me” A documentary by Weijun Chen on fifth-graders in China at 6 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 100 Oak St., Oakland. Free. 326-1440.

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 8:45 to noon at the Latina Center, 3919 Roosevelt Ave., Richmond. 981-5332.

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991.

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830.

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. Open bicycle repair lab where participants may use our tools as well as receive help with their own repairs free of charge. Waterside Workshops, 84 Bolivar Drive, Aquatic Park. 644-2577.

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 5

Stone Pillars of Northbrae Walking Tour Learn about the history of one of Berkeley’s most park-full neighborhoods through its scores of stone pillars. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of North Berkeley Library, on the Alameda near Hopkins St. 524-2383. www.berkeleypaths.org/events/wedwalks.htm

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.

Recording African American Stories Add your voice to the Library of Congress and the National Museum of African American History, Wed. from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., by appointment, at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, through Sept. 12. For appointment call 228-3207.

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome 548-9840.

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.

The Princess Project - East Bay Open House from 6 to 8 p.m. at Youth Uprising, 8711 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. Come help Bay Area girls feel confident and special; help organize a volunteer-run effort to distribute free prom dresses and accessories. 846-5271.

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “The Heavens Call” at 7 p.m. and “Zero City” at 8:45 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Viaticum (The Carnal Table), on stage at Live Oak Theatre Thursday through Sunday, is described as “a tasty bit of hell” and subtitled “A Tragic Farce in Ten Fits,” like Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. Author-director Helen Pau has served up a veritable platter of scenes, vignettes and monologues of the amusingly outré, on Kim A. Tolman’s extravagant set—part Gothic crypt, part king-size chessboard—where the aptly-named Strange family cavort and extemporize, becoming pirates, nuns, secret agents. Like a De Chirico painting, the vanishing point is infinity, and the motifs crowd together, helter-skelter. Features skydiver David Usner as paratrooper/adventurer Saul Strange at his “birthday party turned Last Supper,” with Michaela Greeley excellent as his astringent wife Jean. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday.

ED REED SINGS LOVE STORIES AT YOSHI’S

Ed Reed, jazz singer extraordinaire and a Richmond resident, will make his Yoshi’s debut at the Jack London Square club Wednesday evening, with shows at 8 p.m. ($12) and 10 p.m. ($6). The quartet backing him up will include the co-producers of his maiden CD, Ed Reed Sings Love Stories (samples at edreedsings.com). Berkeley High graduate and New York multi-instrumentalist Peck Allmond and radio personality-producer Bud Spangler on drums, as well as John Wiitala on bass (another album alumnus) and Matt Clark on piano.

“It’s Bud’s debut at Yoshi’s, too,” Reed said. “He’s been behind the scenes there for records he’s produced, but never playing onstage before.”

Reed’s CD, on his and his wife Diane’s label, has been getting airplay around the country, and Reed has been booked later this fall at the Jazz Standard in New York and for a benefit in Boston, headlined by George Benson. His standing gig has been Tuesday evenings (excepting tonight) at the Cheese Board pizza parlor on Shattuck in North Berkeley, where he and pianist Brian Cooke both bring in new material weekly, exploring the American songbook.

The Yoshi’s show, however, puts Reed in the premiere jazz room in the Bay Area. Well-known jazzwriter-musician Lee Hildebrand wrote Reed up last week in the Chronicle and “the phone’s been ringing ever since,” Reed said. “When I went to work at Kaiser [where Reed’s a counselor], everybody applauded! I’m excited about Yoshi’s. When I was growing up in L.A., I performed in the weekly talent shows at the Lincoln Theatre, where the comic used to come out with a big black gun and shoot you, if the audience didn’t like you. And I got shot a lot! They’d really jeer you. I’m glad I had that kind of rigorous apprenticeship—but Yoshi’s ... that’s got to be a step up!”

If, in the year 2107, someone were to write a book like Richard Schwartz’s latest effort, he could well be one of its subjects.

Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley is a guiltless pleasure, a delightful collection of tales about some of the city’s most fascinating and wrongly forgotten characters.

A builder by trade, Schwartz is Berkeley’s resident amateur historian, the author of two previous works of community history.

After his Berkeley 1900 account of the city at the dawn of a new century and Earthquake Exodus, 1906 with its account of Berkeley’s response to the Great Earthquake of 1906, Schwartz moves on to profile in words and contemporary images some of the folks who help the city’s justifiable reputation as home to some of the most colorful, cantankerous and fascinating folks on the nation’s Left Coast.

Self-proclaimed Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, he was also a familiar figure in the city across the bay from the seat of his realm, conducting reviews of UC Berkeley military cadets and upstaging a real-life emperor who’d come to lecture on a university stage.

Then there was John E. Boyd, an oft-lauded and occasionally arrested homespun essayist and sometimes city-official-cum-town-drunk—in addition to his self-anointed role as Boss Baggage Buster of Beautiful Berkeley.

A vivid stylist whose wordsmithing some thought comparable to Twain’s, he also became a cinematic hero, a rescuer on horseback in the 1906 film A Trip to Berkeley, which still plays on the Pacific Film Archive’s silver screen.

Courts closed when he died, the City Hall flag flew at half-mast and Odd Fellows Hall filled with mourners.

The opening essay tells the tales of Irish immigrant Martin Murrey Dunn, who owned some of the choicest acreage in the Berkeley hills, and of Dave, the fire horse who loved him.

In affably agreeable prose, Schwartz describes the unique role of the horse in fighting fires and of the affection that bonded the highly intelligent animals and their human trainers and partners in firefighting.

Part of the land where Dunn raised his horses is today occupied by the Claremont Hotel, built eight years after his death.

Land battles

In Berkeley of late, all the serious politics have been about land use, often pitting neighbor against neighbor, and neighborhoods against developers and officialdom.

The landmarks ordinance, the Gaia Building, UC Berkeley’s construction boom and Western Berkeley rezoning have generated endless debate, litigation (threatened and often realized) and political campaigns while consuming reams of print and barrels of ink. Even that most venerable of Berkeley battles, the contest over the fate of that plot of land dubbed People’s Park, has been heating up again.

So it should come as no surprise that confrontations about human real estate “improvements” have deep Berkeley roots—replete with threats, a murder and a feisty homeowner who literally laid her life on the line.

The most compelling of Schwartz’s land battle stories is the saga of Mary Townsend, a real-life pistol-packin’ momma.

A small woman with a pleasant smile who made her living as a domestic worker, Townsend had seen her share of life’s miseries. Widowed by the Civil War and burdened with a ne’er-do-well son, she had become a highly respected figure in 1870s, and owned a home on Shattuck Avenue south of Channing Way.

And then a man memorialized in two Berkeley streets, Frances Kittredge Shattuck, teamed with James Barker to entice the Central Pacific Railroad to run a line up Shattuck from Oakland.

While most property owners accepted the railroad’s buyout offers, Townsend and neighbor Peter Maloney refused, since the property sought by the railroad would put the tracks right at their front doors.

Momentarily stymied, the railroad curved the tracks to avoid the two lots, then enticed the county to launch condemnation proceedings.

Rejecting further settlement offers which included a swap for an unusable lot and angered by the railroad’s refusal to pay for moving her house, she took legal action and a Solomonic court split the legal baby in an 1877 decision, giving the railroad an easement on the lots, while leaving legal title to the land and a $1,030 award to Townsend.

But railroad baron Charlie Crocker refused to pay, and threatened to leave town with his tracks unless Townsend’s neighbors coughed up the cash. They did.

It took another two decades for the battle to erupt anew, this time over the city’s move to pave between the tracks to keep down dust. Before it ended, Townsend had moved her house onto the tracks, lain across the rails and shoved a pistol into the chest of the town marshal.

The rest of the story is for the reader to discover.

Schwartz’s 17 chapters are like kernels of hot, buttered popcorn—crunchy and delightfully tasty, and almost impossible to devour one at a time—with the last one vanishing with regret at the feast’s end and with appreciation for the pleasure they brought.

This reader, for one, didn’t stop until the whole volume had been consumed.

Though “amateur” has evolved into something of a condescending slur, Richard Schwartz restores the word to some of its earlier luster.

Only in athletics does the word retain its original meaning as a “lover,” someone whose passion for the beloved is motivated by love, not money.

Schwartz is a passionate amateur of Berkeley history, approaching his discipline with both passion and rigor and crafting his words with affection and humor coupled with the more orthodox demands of accuracy and attribution.

Infectious enthusiasm combined with the larger-than-life natures of many of the characters he profiles prove an irresistable combination.

He offers us stories of folks whose names deserve their places on the city’s roster of streets—though one subject’s horse did leave its moniker, Prince, on the South Berkeley street that a certain Daily Planet writer calls home.

It takes guts for a singer to do a retrospective on the work of Nina Simone. Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn—Simone’s modern jazz contemporaries—had far more rich and melodious voices, but Nina had a presence, a duality that was both soft and mysterious and inviting as a Carolina deepwoods night and sharp and scary and sudden as a razor held aloft. The jazz and blues divas of her era lived their songs, but Nina embodied them. She was America’s practicing priestess vodoún—stately and black, simultaneously baring herself naked and frighteningly aloof—and modern singers attempt to take us down her path at their peril.

Well, either Kim Nalley has no fear, or she is damn good at not showing it.

In an hour-and-a-half tribute to Simone at the Berkeley BART Plaza on Sunday afternoon, pointedly taken without intermission, Nalley did not try to recreate Nina—who could, after all?—but interpreted her life and music in a way that made us appreciate both Nina’s pain and her greatness, in the way the soft, midnight moon reflects the long-departed light of a burning sun.

The concert was part of last weekend’s Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival.

As remarkable as the concert itself—given with Nalley’s traditional sultry, sensual range—is that the singer was able to pull it off in the outdoor plaza while competing with passing buses, chattering children, and the occasional hip-hop beat coming from open car windows on Shattuck Avenue. That, if anything, marks the distinct difference between Nalley and Nina. Simone was the epitome of the proud diva, famous for sometimes halting her performances in mid-stanza to turn her eye on a couple conversing in low tones in the front row, fixing them with an icy stare, and remarking, coldly, “Oh, don’t mind me. I’ll wait until you’re finished.” Nalley has a different type of performance presence, drawing listeners into a special singing circle surrounding her that seems to magically mute any outside thoughts or sounds.

Interspersed with a running commentary that was also a lesson in history—both African-American and American in the whole—Nalley took the plaza audience from Nina’s early takes on 19th century African-American folk ballads (“In the Evening by the Moonlight” by the once-popular but now long-forgotten African-American composer James Bland, better known for his minstrel standards “O Dem Golden Slippers” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”), to the traditional woman’s lament “House of the Rising Sun” (Nalley reminded us that while male rock artists covered this song after Nina re-popularized it, only a woman’s touch makes you understand that this was about entrapment as a worker in a New Orleans whorehouse), to the blues standard “Trouble in Mind.”

Nina Simone was more than a singer—she was an accomplished composer and concert pianist—and Nalley re-created one of her most famous and controversial original compositions, “Mississippi Goddamn,” conceived in those dark and bitter times following the bombing of Montgomery Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church and the assassination of Mississippi NAACP Field Director Medgar Evers. “Mississippi Goddamn” was in a bouncy, irreverent, defiant mode (“a show tune for which the show has not yet been created,” Nalley quotes Nina as saying), and the Carnegie Hall concert audience who heard its world premiere must have thought, at first, that Nina was kidding. “Midway through the song,” Nalley tells us, just before she breaks into the line about the bloodhounds on her trail, “you can hear the point on the recording where the audience realizes she’s serious.”

The song, Nalley explains, turned Nina from a performer to a civil rights protester, eventually leading to her targeting by the FBI, and eventual exile from America.

Also notable in Nalley’s rendition was Nina’s interpretation of the Screaming Jay Hawkins signature piece “I Put a Spell on You,” in which both Nina’s and Nalley’s raw sexuality and spirit-woman wickedness are given full play, and in the closing, rousing “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” gospel great, with a rolling piano accompaniment by local pianist Tammy Hall that made even the atheists in the Berkeley audience want to jump up and shout.

A San Francisco transplant and UC Berkeley graduate, Nalley is a locally based band leader, producer, and vocalist who appears regularly at Bay Area venues. For those who missed the Berkeley BART Plaza concert, Nalley has thoughtfully provided us with a CD that compiles her musical tribute to Nina, “She Put a Spell on Me: Kim Nalley Sings Nina Simone,” that includes many of the songs performed on Sunday.

A birch is about as exotic as a banana here, and maybe they’re both ubiquitous in people’s front yards for similar nostalgic reasons—or maybe instead because they’re so outrageous when you know where you are.

They’re both thirsty, so it’s good to keep them in the well-watered zone of the garden. A cluster of birches looks natural with a patch of lawngrass and/or a fern, an understory flower or two. It doesn’t take acres to evoke the Eastern North American forests in their most tender-looking moods.

By some standards, of course, birch is tough as nails. Most of the several birch species need plenty of water but other than that, they’re sturdy; they stand up just fine to New England, Alaskan, and Siberian winters and they’re resourceful enough to use as pioneer plants on “reclaimed” culm dumps and other mining scars. The sight of white-barked paper birches on a black anthracite spoilbank is one of those Proustian guilty pleasures for me. I know it’s devastation, but those trees look so starkly handsome I still have to smile.

Lots of birches have tan or reddish bark and they’re generally good-looking too, but the emblematic birch, the one that gets photographed against blue-white snow or a brilliant green spring understory has white bark. Here, it’s usually the North American native paper or white birch (Betula papyrifera), gray birch (B. populifolia) in those postcard photos and the European white birch (B. pendula) in our gardens.

This time of year, people often panic at the sight of blackened, soot-covered, and bug-riddled leaves on their birches. All the birch species I know of are susceptible to aphids, and aphid droppings—one of several such excretions called “honeydew” because they do in fact taste sweet—grow various kinds of mold and mildew readily, on the leaf surfaces and on any object beneath them.

(That’s pretty much what’s going on with those poor beleaguered tuliptrees on University Avenue, by the way. Yes, they should be replaced, but a few at a time and not during nesting season please! It’s a shame: they’re beautiful trees but they’re really happier in a more lush situation like a lawn.)

My earnest counsel about aphid-infested birches? Do nothing. The trees are deciduous and will drop their leaves in a month or two anyway, bugs and all. Meanwhile you have the ideal ladybird beetle nursery and that’s what you’ll want around next spring when the aphids return. Look at whatever leaves are in reach and see if you don’t have some of those ferocious black alligator-looking ladybeetle youngsters there. The kids eat more aphids than the adults do, as kids are wont. Cherish them.

While I’m dishing advice and barking orders: I’ve notice that some people have the unsavory habit of topping their birches, cutting the top several feet of the tree right off. What’s up with that? Aside from destroying the natural grace of the tree, it’s slow murder, and what branches do arise from the mutilated trunk will be weakly attached—originating only from the edge of the trunk—and so prone to snapping off when they grow heavy enough to be more than twigs. Stop that right now.

Aside from the Robert Frost poem about “a swinger of birches” and the birchbark canoe whose survival John McPhee eloquently celebrated, birches figure in our culture, or at least our décor, largely as a signifier of the demi-wilderness, the cabin in the woods that’s just a bit beyond dirt flooring, the sort of thing LL Bean touts. The elegant white bark gets used for picture frames and occasional furniture.

Once upon a time it made paper, just as I thought it must when I was a kid. Historic “frontier” documents exist that are scrawled and signed on a wide strip peeled right off the tree. It seems irresistible for the sort of folks who write on living trees, too, as the “Fred + Chloe 4 ever” eventually becomes something like a keloid, black and prominent against the white, ready to embarrass Fred + Chloe’s kids unto the third generation.

My own cultural madeline featuring birches—aside from making strictly decorative porridge and bread out of the ripe catkins to go with the mulberries we gorged on in summer—is birch beer. Cook’s Illustrated site www.cooks.com/rec has a recipe for real beer-type birch beer made with birch sap and yeast. What I remember, though, is a red soda somewhat like root beer but less heavy. Apparently it’s a Pennsylvania Dutch thing, judging by its distribution.

My sister Ellen took a load of it along with a few pounds of garlic ring bologna and Utz’s potato chips down to Orlando a couple of weeks ago to celebrate her daughter’s graduation from nursing school. The exotic-or-nostalgic cuisine got an enthusiastic reception there. Now I’m wondering how well it would make it through the average airport.

And I miss my sister, too.

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. Birch trees in their unmangled natural form. These, like many trees this year, are showing early fall color.

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Green Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section.

Full Moon Walk at John Muir National Historic Site Walk up Mt. Wanda to see the moon rise over Mt. Diablo. Bring water, flashlight and good walking shoes for the steep trail. Reservations required. 925-228-8860.

“Baraka” a film of images from 24 countries showing the beauty and destruction of nature and humans at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Auditions at 4 p.m. at the Crowden School. For information on what to prepare and to make an appointment call 849-988. www.ypsomusic.net

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830.

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

Recording African American Stories Add your voice to the Library of Congress and the National Museum of African American History, Wed. from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., by appointment, at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, through Sept. 12. For appointment call 228-3207.

Get Involved with Your Local Green Party Meeting at 7 p.m. at the Grassroots House, 2022 Blake between Shattuck & Milvia. www.berkeleygreens.org

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Auditions at 4 p.m. at the Crowden School. For information on what to prepare and to make an appointment call 849-988. www.ypsomusic.net

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 8:45 to noon at the Downtown Oakland Senior Center, 200 Grand Ave. 981-5332.

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com

“This is my Home” a film on the struggle of displaced public housing residents in post-Katrina New Orleans, at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way, under the Sather Gate Parking Garage. 848-1196.

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310.

SATURDAY, SEPT. 1

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.

SUNDAY, SEPT. 2

Poetry Garden Celebration from 1 to 3 p.m. on the corner of Milvia and Lincoln at Berkeley Arts Magnet School. Open mic for poetry performance and paper and pencils for on the spot poetic inspiration. Children especially welcome. 548-1707. mccoatty@hotmail.com

Due to overzealous use of the spell-checking function, the name of Pacific Film Archive house pianist Jon Mirsalis was inadvertently printed as Jon Misrules in an Aug. 24 story about avant-garde cinema. We regret the error.